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‘Henry needed loyal noblemen and gentlemen to retain followers who would serve under them in war and bolster the power in local communities. Yet he was wary of the way such retaining might provoke instability and took vigorous action to regulate it. He used Edward IV’s statute against retaining of 1468 to prosecute those he did not trust and secured a stricter statute in 1504.’

‘When the imposition of Henry’s will hurt his subjects, it was easy for those subjects to blame the king’s executives, especially when those executives seemed so eager to impose the king’s power and when they prospered from their service to the king. And the fact that to serve the king well, as the recruitment of troops shows with particular clarity, the new men had to increase their own power’

‘By the end of the 1570s, whatever the instincts and nostalgia of their seniors, a generation was growing up which had known nothing else, which believed the Pope to be Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world.’

‘The confusion evident in the minds of clergy and laity about the likely direction of the religious policy of the regime is understandable, even as late as 1560, given the ambivalence of the religious measures. The modifications in the Elizabethan prayer-book from that approved in 1552 did seem designed to soften its more starkly Protestant features.’

‘Not that the Marian authorities were unaware of the need to teach the people once more to appreciate and value the ceremonies which had been proscribed by Cranmer and the Council under Edward. Behind the repudiation of ceremonial by the reformers lay a radically different conceptual world, a world in which text was everything, sign nothing.’

‘Edward IV and Richard III had seen a shift away from the traditional dominance of the exchequer in royal financial management towards coordination of royal income and expenditure by the treasurer of the chamber. At first, Henry reversed this trend, restoring exchequer supremacy. But by 1487 he was beginning to concentrate new streams of income in the chamber and soon it was more powerful than ever.’

‘In parliament, as in court and council, the ubiquity of the new men gave Henry’s regime its characteristic air of purposeful, if not always popular, activity. Their versatility was striking: the same men presented political advice and argument in council and parliament, organised household hospitality and display, kept the king company, participated in court ceremonial’

‘Dudley was concerned about the tensions evident in Henry’s reign between common law and ecclesiastical law, clergy and laity, declaring that ‘any manner of grudge’ between the king’s ‘subjects of the spiritualty and his subjects of the temporality for privilege or liberties’ might be ‘established and reformed’ only by the king. But he harped above all on the need to impose justice on the powerful.’

‘In summer 1497 Perkin Warbeck prepared to invade England from Scotland, claiming the throne on the basis that he was Richard, duke of York, one of the long-lost Princes in the Tower. To prepare the way, he issued a bitter indictment of his rival, King Henry VII. His charges ran from judicial murder and extortionate taxation to breach of the church’s liberties’

‘Cranmer disagreed. Religious changes in Henry’s lifetime had been widely obeyed as Henry’s personal diktat. Cranmer was worried that too rapid a progress towards Protestantism in the new reign would be resisted by the people at large as the manipulation of the child-king by a Protestant clique within the Council.’

‘the issuing of a proclamation about the “laudable ceremonies” dealt with in the Ten Articles... But any reformer who took encouragement from this proclamation was to be rudely disillusioned before the spring was out. Henry was on the whole committed to the reform of the cult of the saints and of images, but he was ferociously opposed to any deviation from traditional teaching on the Mass.’

‘revolution had been preceded by a vigorous campaign against heresy, in both its familiar Lollard and its newer Lutheran forms. Specifically, the heretics of the late 1520s were pursued for their attacks on the traditional cultus - the observation of fasts and holidays, the invocation of saints, the veneration of images and relics, pilgrimages, and the cult of intercession on behalf of the dead in Purgatory.’

‘Preachers and moralists were consistent in urging men and women to “do for themselves” in this matter, to send “our substance before us by our own handes” by alms to the poor and other good works, while they were still in good health, rather than leaving such matters to the deathbed or in the chancy hands of executors.

‘There can be no doubt of the crucial importance attached to proper preparation for death by ordinary men and women, which underlay the expression of such sentiments in wills... The making of a will was itself one aspect of this provision, though of not merely as a secular but as a religious duty. Even more important was the securing of time for repentance and the last Sacraments of the Church.’

‘The influence of the cult of the dead was ubiquitous. Yet it would be a mistake to deduce from its ubiquity that late medieval English religion was morbid or doom-laden. It was certainly not the case in England, as Huizinga thought was generally so in late medieval Christianity, that it knew only “lamentation about the briefness of all earthly glory” and “jubilation over the salvation of the soul”.’

‘to change the geography of the other world and hence of the universe, to alter time in the afterlife and hence the link between earthly, historical time and eschatological time, between the time of existence and the time of anticipation - to do these things was to bring about a gradual but nonetheless crucial intellectual revolution.’

‘Unlike baptism, where the objects used in the sacrament were jealously guarded against lay misuse or contamination, the blessings of salt, water, and wax were intended to provide the laity with sources of “inexorable and compelling power” which they themselves could use against demons, diseases, and distress of every kind.’

‘saints were perceived as part of the economy of grace. They were dispensers of gifts and miracles, and the essence of their cult lay in its assurance of the possibility of rescue from the iron laws of cause and effect... often portrayed as embodying precisely those elements of tenderness and compassionate humanity which were the distinguishing marks of medieval devotion to the name and person of Jesus.’

‘Sir Edmund had the responsibility of making sure that no play contained seditious or heretical material. Every script, whether it was to be played at court or in a playhouse or by a company touring the county towns, had to be submitted to Sir Edmund, and no play could be performed anywhere in England or Wales until he had signed his name and fixed his seal to the first page of the manuscript.’

‘But such pressure from above was more than matched by enthusiasm from below. In the two generations before the Henrician Reformation the parish churches of England benefited from a flood of investment in building and ornaments, and the making of new images and the gilding, painting, and embellishing of old ones was a prominent part of manifestation of popular devotion.’

‘“All the scripts?” He was having trouble understanding the disaster that had befallen us.
“Everything,” I said. “and the Sharers won’t be happy.” That was an understatement. The chest had contained all our plays, all the parts, all the scripts. I was not sure whether my brother had locked a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or of his new Italian play into the heavy chest, but everything else had been there.’

‘The prestige of the Sacrament as the centre and source of the whole symbolic system of late medieval Catholicism implied an enormously high doctrine of priesthood. The priest had access to mysteries forbidden to others: only he might utter the words which transformed bread and wine into the flesh and blood of God incarnate, those “fyue wordes. withouten drede / that no mon but a prest schulde rede”.’

‘the Mass lay at the heart of the liturgy. In the Mass the redemption of the world, wrought on Good Friday once and for all, was renewed and made fruitful for all who believed. Christ himself, immolated on the altar of the cross, became present on the altar of the parish church, body, soul, and divinity, and his blood flowed once again, to nourish and renew Church and world.’

‘The condemned, their hands tied behind their backs, were brought to their death on a cart, the ropes were tightened around their necks, and the cart dragged away so that they fell a foot or so, jerked to a stop, and started dancing. If they had friends, and if the constable and the hangman stood back, they might die quickly by having those friends drag down on their ankles’

‘The company was beginning to enjoy the play, and there was a growing excitement in the room as it continued, but I just sat simmering with an angry resentment. Alan Rust was right, I was playing a man, but the man I played had to pretend to be a woman. And there was nothing I could do about it. I had been cozened by my grinning brother.’

‘But the crucial factor in the growth of a well-instructed laity in fifteenth-century England was the spread of literacy down the social scale, even to many women. We have already considered the impact of this development in connection with the multiplication of primers, but many other types of religious texts also circulated - didactic treatises on the virtues or vices, saints’ lives, rhymed moral fables’

‘not difficult to understand the importance of the liturgical calendar for late medieval people. There was, in the first place, no alternative, secular reckoning of time: legal deeds, anniversaries, birthdays were reckoned by the religious festivals on which they occurred, rents and leases fell in at Lady Day, Lammas, or Michaelmas. The seasonal observances of the liturgical calendar affected everyone.’

‘My borrowed finery made me look wealthy, and apprentices shouted at me, offering me silver plate, linen, saddlery, gloves, or fine French lace. I ignored them, walking the city confidently, but always remembering my constant fear when I had first arrived. No one accosted me now, no one threatened me, because after seven years I had become a Londoner.’