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The Church
The evolution of the Church as it impacted on northern England
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Headlines are in brown.
Dates are in red.
Hyperlinks to other pages are in dark blue.
References and citations are in turquoise.
Context and local history are in purple.
Geographical context is in green.
See also the
Farndales and religion.
563 CE
The Hiberno-Scottish mission was a
series of expeditions in the 6th and 7th centuries by Gaelic missionaries
originating from Ireland that spread Celtic Christianity in Scotland, Wales,
England and Merovingian France. Celtic Christianity spread first within
Ireland. Since the 8th and 9th centuries, these early missions were called 'Celtic Christianity'.
Columba was an Irish prince born in 521
and educated at the Bible school at Clonard. At the age of 25, Columba’s first
mission involved the establishment of a school at Derry. Following this,
Columba spent seven years allegedly establishing over 300 churches and church
schools.
In 563, Columba came to Iona from
Ireland with twelve companions, and founded a monastery. It developed as an
influential centre for the spread of Christianity among the Picts and Scots.
580 CE
The historian Procopius
(500 to 565 CE) described the people of Brittia
as Angiloi to Pope Gregory the Great, Gregory
had seen fair haired slaves for sale and replied that they were not Angles,
but angels. His pun is sometimes taken to define the origin of the English
and Gregory continued to class them as a single peoples.
Hence there grew a single
and distinct English church. It adopted Roman practices in its dogma and
liturgy (as later confirmed at the Synod of Whitby in 663 CE), but it venerated
English saints and developed its own character.
597 CE
Pope Gregory sent
Augustine, prior of a Roman monastery to Kent on an ambassadorial and religious
mission to convert the Angli, and he was welcomed by
King Aethelberht.
The English church would
come to own a quarter of cultivated land in England and it brought back
literacy. English identity began in a religious concept.
627 CE
Edwin converted to the
Christian religion, along with his nobles and many of his subjects, in 627 and
was baptised at Eoforwic. Edwin built the first church at Eoforwic (York) amidst the Roman ruins and it was
later replaced by a larger stone church.
Stone
crosses or spelhowes/spel crosses started to appear in the landscape, which seem to have been
meeting places of early local government. There is a story that Kirkdale church
was first built on the site of such a stone cross.
634 CE
Edwin's successor, Oswald, was sympathetic to the Celtic church and around 634
he invited Aidan from Iona to found a monastery at Lindisfarne as a base for
converting Northumbria to Celtic Christianity.
Aidan soon established a
monastery on the cliffs above Whitby
with Hilda as abbess.
Further monastic sites were established at Hackness
and Lastingham and Celtic Christianity became more
influential in Northumbria than the Roman system.
There is a traditional
story that a monastery was built at Oswaldkirk in
Ryedale, but was never finished.
659 CE
Christianity in Ryedale and the stone
crosses of the Ryedale School
Many local churches in Ryedale date back
to the Anglo-Saxon period. The churches are not the earliest evidence of the
arrival of Christianity to the north of England. The first evidence was the
establishment of a chain of monastic sites from Lindisfarne down the coast to Whitby, their influence then extending
inland to Crayke, Lastingham
and Hackness. The Venerable Bede recorded that in 659
CE the monk Cedd hallowed an inauspicious site at Lastingham
and established there the religious observances of Lindisfarne where he had
been brought up. By the time Bede was writing in circa 730 CE, there was a
stone church at Lastingham.
Christianity was spread through the work
of missionaries who travelled the countryside, often erecting preaching
crosses. They were originally made of wood, but with the re
introduction of building in stone, stone crosses became the norm. These
preaching crosses depicted scenes from the Bible and were often elaborately
decorated with motifs from the Mediterranean. The carvings may have originally
been painted in bright colours. In the central part of Ryedale there were local
Craftsman who produced such crosses which were unique in their design. A
typical Ryedale School cross was about 6 feet tall with a slightly tapering,
flat, oblong section shaft. The style occurs in Kirkbymoorside, Levisham and Middleton. The Ryedale dragon is an
ornamentation on the back panel of the cross shaft. A single beast, often in an
S shape, filled the whole panel.
Yet Yorkshire folklore remains rooted in
Anglian and Norse paganism including tales of the erection of Freeborough Hill by the devil and of hobs. Dragons hunted in Cleveland,
with tales in Loftus.
663 CE
The competing influences
of the Roman Church and the Celtic Christianity originating from Iona caused
conflict within the church until the issue was resolved at the Synod of Whitby
in 663 by Oswiu of Northumbria opting to adopt the Roman system.
The schism had come about
because the church in the south were tied to Rome, but the northern church had
become increasingly influenced by the doctrines from Iona. The Synod was held
in the monastery at Streoneschalch near to Whitby.
665 CE
Cuthbert of Lindisfarne
(c. 634 – 20 March 687) was an Anglo-Saxon saint of the early
Northumbrian church in the Celtic tradition. He was a monk, bishop and hermit,
associated with the monasteries of Melrose and Lindisfarne in the Kingdom of
Northumbria, today in north-eastern England and south-eastern Scotland. Both
during his life and after his death, he became a popular medieval saint of
Northern England, with a cult centred on his tomb at Durham Cathedral. Cuthbert
is regarded as the patron saint of Northumbria.
Cuthbert grew up in or
around Lauderdale, near Old Melrose Abbey, a daughter-house of Lindisfarne,
today in Scotland. He decided to become a monk after seeing a vision on the
night in 651 that Aidan, the founder of Lindisfarne, died, but he seems to have
experienced some period of military service beforehand. He was made
guest-master at the new monastery at Ripon, soon after 655, but had to return
with Eata of Hexham to Melrose when Wilfrid was given the monastery instead.
About 662 he was made Prior at Melrose, and around 665 went as Prior to
Lindisfarne. In 684 he was made bishop of Lindisfarne, but by late 686 he
resigned and returned to his hermitage as he felt he was about to die. He was
probably in his early 50s.
685 CE
By about 685 CE, the early
church at Kirkdale was dedicated to St Gregory. There are two elegant tomb
stones within its grounds which are once said to have borne the name of King Oethelwald. More recent excavations tend to suggest that
the church at Kirkdale was important.
The origin of parish
churches emerged at about this time. A parish was a district that supported a
church by payment of tithes in return for spiritual services. Some churches
were linked to manor houses and others originated as the districts of missioning
monasteries. The church at Whitby was near a major settlement, whilst the
church of St Gregory’s at Kirkdale was located remotely in a dale. By 1145,
Kirkdale was described as the church of Welburn.
Pope Gregory had
encouraged the conversion of pagan holy places to Christianity and the church
at Kirkbymoorside is near a large burial mound.
731 CE
The Venerable Bede (672 or
673 to 26 May 735) (“Saint Bede”) was
an English monk and an author and scholar who wrote the Ecclesiastical History
of the English People which he completed in about 731 CE. He was one of the
greatest teachers and writers during the Early Middle Ages, and is sometimes
called "The Father of English History". He
served at the monastery of St Peter and its companion monastery of St Paul at
Monkwearmouth and Jarrow in the Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria.
The Life of
the Venerable Bede, on the state of Britain in the seventh century,
begins: In the seventh century of the Christian era, seven Saxon kingdoms
had for some time existed in Britain. Northumbria or Northumberland, the
largest of these, consisted of the two districts Deira and Bernicia, which had
recently been united by Oswald King of Bernicia ... The place of his birth is
said by Bede himself to have been in the territory afterwards belonging to the
twin monasteries of Saint Peter and Saint Paul at Weremouth
and Jarrow. The whole of this district, lying along the coast near the mouths
of the rivers Tyne and Weir, was granted to Abbot Benedict by King Egfrid two
years after the birth of the Bede.... Britain, which some writers have called
another world, because from its lying at a distance it has been overlooked by
most geographers, contained in its remotest parts a place on the borders of
Scotland, where Bede was born and educated. The whole country was formed
formerly studded with monasteries, and beautiful cities founded therein by the
Romans, but now, owing to the devastations of the Danes and Normans, has
nothing to allure the senses. Through it runs the Were, a river of no mean
width, and of tolerable rapidity. It flows into the sea and receives ships,
which are driven thither by the wind, into its tranquil bosom. A certain Benedict
built churches on its banks, and founded there two monasteries, named after St
Peter and St Paul, and united together by the same rule and bond of brotherly
love.
Bede gave intellectual and religious
significance to as burgeoning nation at Jarrow from where many centuries later John
William Farndale was the youngest member of the Jarrow marchers. Bede first
defined an English identity. Bede produced the greatest volume and quantity of
writing in the western world of his time. At his monastery at Jarrow he had
access to a university library with more books than were in the libraries of
Oxford or Cambridge 700 years later. (Robert Tombs,
The English and their History, 2023, 24, 26).
871 CE
Alfred
the Great (871 to 899 CE) has been
remembered in history as educated and practical, a Christian philosopher king.
959 CE
There was an English
church and English saints.
1009
This was the time of Archbishop Wulfstan
was very involved in the reform of the English church, and was concerned with
improving both the quality of Christian faith and the quality of ecclesiastical
administration in his dioceses (especially York, a relatively impoverished
diocese at this time). He urged the casting out of heathen practices,
witchcraft and idols. He wanted to see the observation of Sundays.
There was some revival of the Church in
the later Scandinavian period and this may have been a time of some church
building, especially in places called Kirkby.
1030
The Horn of
Ulph is an eleventh-century oliphant (a horn carved from an
elephant's tusk). It is two feet four inches long, and has a diameter at the
mouth of five inches. Given its size and condition, it is a particularly good
example of a medieval oliphant. Tradition holds that it is a horn of tenure,
presented to York Minster by a Norse nobleman named Ulph sometime around 1030.
This suggests that a powerful Scandinavian nobleman was willing to donate a
very valuable object to the Christian church by this time.
1053
It is not clear how strongly held
Christian belief were at a local level. Many pagan customs continued. The days
Tuesday through to Friday are still named after Anglian and Norse Gods. Hills
remained dedicated to the Norse Gods Odin and Woden,
Much Yorkshire folklore remains rooted in Anglian and Norse traditions. Hobs
and boggles remained in field names. However masonry at churches evidences
Christian assimilation. The settlement at Chirchebi that would be the
burgeoning lands of Kirkbymoorside was a small rural community focused around
the church of St Gregory and its priest. The eleventh century sundial at
Kirkdale is the best preserved of several including others at Edstone and Old Byland.
1078
A mission arrived from Evesham Abbey
Mercia in York, were joined by Stephen of York and established a Benedictine
monastery in the old ruins at Whitby. Some
of the monks went to Lastingham and they partly build
a large church there.
The monks led by Stephen of York built
St Mary’s Abbey from 1088 to 1089.
1100
After the
Norman Conquest, the church remained a powerful force.
The Normans reorganised the local
church. Many parish churches were rebuilt in stone.
The Rectors received regular tithe
incomes, a tenth of any increase of crops or stock within the whole parish
area.
Oral teaching was mainly in English (in
order to converse with the indigenous population), but they wrote in Latin and
Franch (with some English). Some English religious and cultural traditions
continued.
1128
First Cistercian abbey at
Waverley.
Monastic orders, such as Rievaulx
in 1128 arrived in England. They became important agricultural communities and
sometimes were involved in iron and coal mining.
Some chose different routes to their
religious goals and hermits started to
appear in the records, often the first known residents of more remote places,
such as Edmund the Hermit of Farndale.
Cuthbert had retired in 676, and moved
to a more contemplative life. With his abbot's leave, he moved to a spot which
Archbishop Eyre identifies with St Cuthbert's Island near Lindisfarne, but
which Raine thinks was near Holburn, at a place now
known as St Cuthbert's Cave. Shortly afterwards, Cuthbert moved to Inner Farne island, two miles from Bamburgh, off the coast of
Northumberland, where he gave himself up to a life of great austerity. At first
he received visitors, but later he confined himself to his cell and opened his
window only to give his blessing. However he could not refuse an interview with
the holy abbess and royal virgin Elfleda, the daughter of Oswiu of Northumbria,
who succeeded St Hilda as abbess of Whitby in 680. The meeting was held on
Coquet Island, further south off the Northumberland coast.
This was an age of giving to religious
orders and the barons had vast empty lands which they could easily donate. This
was a form of insurance policy and generally gifts of land were rewarded by
monks’ prayers to help the passage of the nobility into the after
life.
·
Robert
de Brus gave most of his lands at Guisborough to form a
priory in about 1119 to 1124.
·
Walter
Espec founded Kirkham Priory in 1121 to 1122.
1131
Walter Espec encouraged the founding of the
Cistercian abbey at Rievaulx in 1131. These austere monks sought
detachment from the world, in contrast to the Benedictines and the
Augustinians.
A
breakaway group from St Mary’s Abbey in York established Fountains Abbey and
Kirkham Priory.
Monastic Farming
The
Cistercian way of life was simple. The Cistercian abbots accepted donations of
land but generally avoided settled areas, or cleared them (as at Hoveton and Welburn near Kirkbymoorside).
Significant land grants were given to
the monasteries. Rievaulx soon had a great swathe of properties,
throughout Ryedale and stretching to Teesmouth and Filey. At its peak it had 140 monks and 400 lay brothers.
They tended to site their granges away from villages. Monastic farms were a
separate economic force. The sheep grange was dominant in Yorkshire with many
examples, including at Farndale, of donations of rights to pasture a fixed
number of sheep.
Nunneries
The Cistercians
opposed the establishment of religious houses for women until the early
thirteenth century.
Robert de
Stuteville gave a tract of land to the east of Kirkbymoorside for the
establishment of a nunnery at Keldholme Priory.
1200
By 1200 the organisational structure of
the church had been established:
·
The
provinces of Canterbury (primacy established by 1353) and York;
·
9,500
parishes
The parish had existed before the Norman
Conquest. Parishes had their own guilds and associations and provided social
cohesion through feats and charitable affairs. Church wardens were elected from
the thirteenth century.
The Church, perhaps along with
professional lawyers, was an avenue for a person to rise to wealth within a
generation.
1220s
The preaching orders of
friars arrived, including
the Franciscans or Greyfriars and Dominicans or Blackfriars. Towns
started to see a growth of religious houses.
1221
Dominicans (black friars) began to
arrive in England.
There is an In Our Time podcast on the religious orders of the
Dominicans and the Franciscans, the Blackfriars and Greyfriars,
who were a great force for change in Catholic Europe.
1224
Franciscans (grey friars) began to
arrive in England.
1300
By the fourteenth century, the Church
remained the second most powerful institution.
Tithes were an important part of church
revenue. Local priests gained a secure living with a definite income and
sometimes even a pension. Some clergymen became wealthy. The vicar of
Kirkbymoorside was able to go on pilgrimage to Compostella in Spain.
An important role of vicars was moral
leadership. There was a focus on the Seven Deadly Sins. Even the nobility were
not exempt from reprimand. Occasionally criminals might find sanctuary in
churches. The church became a focus of regular patterns of local life and
important events such as baptisms, marryings, the
churching of women, and funerals, were administered by the church.
1400
John Wycliffe was an
Oxford theologian who, with his followers, nicknamed the
Lollards, or the mumblers, translated the
Bible, seeing this as a return to the traditions of Bede. It coincided with a
wish by lay people to become more actively invested in religious life.
There was however concern about the use
of English, no longer seen as ‘angelic’, accentuated by attempts to translate
wine as cider.
In 1401, heresy was made a capital
offence.
The Constitutions of Oxford
1408 started an unprecedented period of the policing of belief. The
translation of the Bible into English was forbidden.
(Robert Tombs, The English and their History, 2023,
130).
1450s
The discipline of philology (the study
of words, especially the history and development of the words in a particular
language or group of languages.) led to a rejection of ideas deriving from the
fourth century Doctrine of Constantine.
Besides natural colour, life was
monotone, except in the churches where painted walls and cloth added colour to
drab worlds. The wall
paintings at Pickering Church shared
stories of religious belief in the fifteenth century.
By this time, there was a trend away
from donations to monasteries towards abstinence and piety and less worldly
involvement.
However saints and their shrines
remained powerful talisman. For instance a girl from Ampleforth contracted
marriage before the tomb of St William of York.
The priest was expected to teach the creed,
then ten commandments, the seven deadly sins, the sacraments, the lord’s
prayer.
(Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 144, 145).
1466
Printing from the 1430s and cheaper
paper gave opportunities for a wide distribution of new forms of the Bible.
Printed Bibles appeared in German (1466), Italian, Dutch, French, Spanish,
Czech in the 1470s.
1509
The European context in 1509 was
challenging:
·
Geopolitical
crises were tearing Europe apart
·
Western
civilisation was challenged
·
Portends
of the end of the world were rife
·
After
the capture of Constantinople, Muslim forces were threatening Europe
·
1494 – War
between France and the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire
·
1495 -
Savonarola, a Dominican friar, established a theocratic dictatorship in
Florence
·
1527 – Rome
was sacked by the Hapsburgs
·
1530 to 1527 – Muslim raiders took a million Europeans
into slavery
·
1618 to 1648 – the Thirty Years War
In this context there grew a new
interest in Greek and Roman antiquity, and classical styles of literature.
This was taught by the umanisti, the humanists, who started to mock
tradition religious teaching. Humanists included:
·
John
Colet, Dean of St Pauls
·
Thomas
More, lawyer
There is an In
Our Time podcast on Humanism.
Traditional religious teaching was
marked by ceremony, ritual, pilgrimage and indulgences (the remission of
punishment of sin by payment of cash donations to the church).
In England anti Lollard legislation
hampered challenges to traditional medieval Christianity. However there was a
new desire to focus on what God said, rather than rely on traditional
interpretations of what God meant. There was increasing intellectual scepticism.
1516
Erasmus of Rotterdam produced a Greek
New Testament in Latin with changes in wording.
1517
Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar, openly
challenged the established church and its practice of indulgences, and nailed
his critique of the religious authorities to a church door in Wittenburg.
The established church came to be
criticised as hopeless, itself blasphemous, and ruled by corruption.
Luther’s idea initially appealed to
educated folk in German and Swiss towns. The nobility took to his ideas as a
challenge to their natural rivals in the Church.
Soon statues were smashed in churches.
1524
The Peasants’
War swept across Europe.
1526
William Tyndale, an Oxford scholar printed copies of
his English translation of the New Testament from Greek from his base in
Cologne. 16,000 copies were smuggled into England.
1527
After failed attempts to negotiate with
the Pope regarding his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry began to question
whether the Pope had the authority to interpret God’s law and whether he was
superior to a Christian King. These were the underlying issues debated in the
1520s and 1530s.
1529
Henry dismissed Wolsey and confiscated
his property, including Hampton Court.
1530s
In the 1530s fierce debates raged
regarding the positions of the sun and the earth. The discovery of the Americas
from 1492 led to a discovery of new worlds. This all led to a re-examination of
traditionally held beliefs.
1533
Henry appointed Thomas Cranmer as
Archbishop of Canterbury.
There followed a succession of
parliamentary acts to remove the English church from papal jurisdiction.
The Act
in Restraint of Appeals 1533 ended legal recourse to Rome. England was
declared an empire.
1534
The Reformation
The First
Act of Succession 1534 declared Catherine’s marriage ended and conferred
the succession on Anne’s issue.
Two Acts of Supremacy
confirmed that Henry was the only supreme head of the Church of England, under
pain of treason. Every man in the Kingdom was required to take an oath to
accept the new law.
This was a sudden and dramatic change in
the affairs of the Church.
To most ordinary folk, these issues were
remote and caused little issue.
Henry’s own religious doctrine remained
conservative. He insisted on the transubstantiation (the conversion of the body
and blood of Christ into bread and wine). He felt that salvation came from good
work. He was inclined to a degree of moderation in his views of the established
church.
1535
Tyndale was tracked down to Antwerp and
burned for heresy.
However from 1835, Henry, wishing to
prevent the likes of More and Fisher becoming modern Thomas a Beckets, had the
shrine of Becket destroyed and a process started of visitations and stocktaking
of religious houses.
Commissioners
were appointed to assess the wealth of churches. One commissioner, Thomas
Layton wrote of ‘great corruption among religious persons’ in Yorkshire.
The commissioners sacked Prior Cockerill of Guisborough.
(John Rushton, The History of Ryedale, 2003,
167).
1536
The Dissolution of the monasteries 1536
to 1539.
Rievaulx
Abbey had 27 buildings in two courtyards, as fulling mill, iron smithy, corn
mill, tannery, houses for craftsmen.
The Earl of Rutland took over Rievaulx
and expended its iron workings
Byland Abbey had 1,500 ewes. It had 4
watermills, a fish house and 3 fulling mills.
The churches at the monasteries were
stripped of their lead rooves.
Henry started to accumulate chests of
gold stored in his bed chamber. There was vast looting and thousands of objects
and works of art taken, and often melted down.
Some historical material was preserved,
for instance by Matthew Parker, Master of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, who saved
many ancient documents.
The significant wealth accumulated from
the Church by the monarchy was spent on creating a new navy and on a futile war
with France in 1544.
The Pilgrimage
of Grace.
1538
It was ordered that the English Bible
should be put into every parish church.
1544
In May 1544, war with France gave rise
to the first officially approved church service in English and to the litany in
the Book of Common Prayer. It was written by Cranmer to encourage prayers for
victory.
1547
The six year reign of Edward VI was a
period of religious consistency.
·
The
reformist Archbishop Cranmer was able to take greater control over religious
affairs
·
There
was a tendency for the evangelists across Europe and in England to become
stricter
·
There
was an extension of the use of English in services
A 1547 edict required the removal of
shrines, candlesticks, effigies and paintings. Poor boxes were to be placed
into churches.
The
Book of Common Prayer became the compulsory liturgy. This would also become the
focus of the growth of the English language, and many phrases which came into
common use derived from it.
1552
A more reformist version of the Book of
Common Prayer was adopted.
1553
Queen Mary (1553 to 1558) wanted to
restore the authority of Rome in the Counter
Reformation.
1556
At first Mary had used subtlety hoping
to encourage a return to the Papal fold. She appointed her cousin, Cardinal
Reginald Pole to negotiate with Rome as legate, and procure a forgiveness of
past sins and a return to the Roman Church.
However Cardinal Pole was not trusted in
Rome and Pope Paul; IV rejected him and revoked his legacy.
Ironically Mary found herself using her
royal; power over the English church to defy the wishes of Rome.
There were also practical difficulties
in returning to the traditional church, since religious objects had been
disposed of and religious buildings now used for other purposes.
The Evangelicals continued to meet and
resist the changes.
And so it was that Mary and Cardinal
Pole turned to force, earning Mary the nickname Bloody Mary
·
There
followed the most intense persecution of the time in Europe
·
280
Protestants burned at the stake.
·
Possession
of heritable literature was subject to the death penalty
·
The
Heresy Laws were reenacted in 1554
·
Bishop
Latimer of Worcester, Bishiop Ridley of London and Archbishop Cranmer were
burned at the stake.
In London there was some sympathy for
stamping down on heresy. However there was increasing sympathy for the victims
of the persecution.
The Reformation and the Counter
Reformation:
·
Led
to the destruction of significant artistic expression
·
Whilst
mass slaughter was prevented by a royal tendency to keep things in bounds,
nevertheless some 1,000 executions for heresy (perhaps a fifth of the
executions across Europe at the time)
·
England
began to see herself as an Empire, under rulers with proclaimed rights from God
·
However
much power was increasingly influenced by parliaments who adopted increasing
functions dubbed omnicompetence
·
A
national consciousness emerged distinct from the rest of Europe which was
centred on Rome – religion became nationalised with its English bible and
prayer book
1558
Elizabeth annulled Mary’s counter
reformation. As the daughter of Anne Boleyn, she relied on royal supremacy and
the reformist principles of her father:
·
The
Act of Supremacy 1558,
An Acte restoring to the Crowne thauncyent Jurisdiction over the State Ecclesiasticall
and Spirituall, and abolyshing
all Forreine Power repugnaunt
to the same
·
The
Act
of Uniformity 1559, authorising a book of common prayer which was similar
to the 1552 version but which retained some Catholic elements
·
The
Thirty
Nine Articles 1563
This was the foundation of a unique
religion which was later called Anglicanism.
“It looked Catholic and sounded Protestant.” It was a religious middle
way. It was a compromise and perhaps the foundation of the British spirit of
compromise. It contrasted to a time of polarisation in Europe, when the badges
of Catholic and Protestant started to be used for the first time (prior to
that, the evolution of the church was seen more as turbulent schisms occurring
within a single Christian church).
·
Elizabeth
promoted choral music – she retained the choir of King’s College Cambridge
which had been restored by Mary
·
She
promoted bell ringing which purists considered to be sinful
·
She
had no sympathy for hardliners from either wing of the religious divide
·
She
stopped heresy trials
1630
Charles faced a serious religious
challenge., with a growing intensity of feeling about religion.
The parish had become the social
cohesion of local communities, about 500 to 600 folk bound together, which
reflected the social and political as well as religious hierarchy.
Puritanism was the name given to the ‘godly’ by
their opponents. Mostly Calvinists who believed in predestination and that God
had chosen an elect for salvation, God controlled everything that happened.
·
Their
beliefs caused psychological stress.
·
In
some ways they reinforced existing hierarchies and elect gentry imposed strict
order on the idle and drunk
·
They
also appealed to subversives, who saw themselves as godly with a right to
oppose and reprimand their ungodly superiors
Arminianism took its name from Jacobus Arminius,
and favoured free will, in direct opposition to the Puritans. They did not see
the Catholics as a false religion. This was the focus of Charles I and William
Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
There were fears that Charles was
getting to close to Catholicism and this was reinforced by his Queen Henrietta
Maria’s practice of her Catholicism.
Charles tended to be tolerant of
religious matters and no one burned for heresy during his reign. Indeed 1569 to
1642 was a time when there was no rebellion.
Meantime Scotland, a more turbulent and
militarised society, was left to govern itself since 1603 and there was a
growth of a Calvinist model of Scottish Presbyterianism, run by committees of
lay elders and clergy and without the rule of bishops.
In 1636, Archbishop Laud ordered the use
of a Scottish remodel of Cranmer‘s Book of Common Prayer. In July 1637, there
was outrage and resistance at St Giles in Edinburgh.
By 1638 a committee of lairds, burgesses
and ministers had drafted a Covenant to uphold the Scottish kirk and resist
popery. The Covenanters were seen as rebels
by Charles.
1688
After the Glorious Revolution, the
Church of England became more and more central to everyday life from feeding
the poor to repairing roads.
The Act
of Toleration 1689 allowed dissenters a freedom to worship separately, though
not yet extended to Catholics and Jews.
Dissenters could vote and become MPs,
but the Corporation and Test Acts 1661 and 1672 required holders of public
office to be communicant members of the Church – in practice many took
communion occasionally just to qualify.
The Whig-Tory divide manifested itself in
the church, with festive, communal, royalist Tories and puritanical,
capitalistic, parliamentarian Whigs developing there own separate cultures. Merchants
and urban businessmen were often Whigs and dissenters and a non
conformist society emerged, with even the once feared Quakers becoming
rooted in the wealthy merchant class.