Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 > Status Update

‘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.’

‘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”.’

‘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.’