april 2013

Som siste utdrag fra Eamon Duffys bok «The Voices of Morebath» tar jeg med enkelte nokså konkrete ting man måtte gjøre i Morebath for å kunne feire messen igjen, og kunne gjennomføre andre katolske tradisjoner – etter at England igjen ble katolsk under dronning Mary (det varte bare 5 1/2 år). Det katolske alteret måtte på plass igjen i kirken, siden protestantene hadde krevd at disse skulle bort og erstattes med kommunionsbord foran i koret. Videre leser vi (på s 162) hvordan sognepresten (sir Christopher) ledet restaureringsarbeidet:

… The parish was by now working at full stretch to meet the stringent requirements of the official Catholic restoration … The Vicar and Wardens trooped off to Exeter in 1555 to present a new inventory of their church goods to the Royal Commissioners, this time not as a prelude to confiscation but to establish what was still missing and in need of provision. Ten yards of canvas were bought to make a new Lent cloth, Cecily at Moore was paid seven groats for making up a new surplice, and allowed to keep the seven-pence-worth of linen she had left over. From a series of business trips William Hurley brought back a new pyx for the Sacrament and, separately, the winter and summer volumes of a new breviary `of the largest volumen’ for Sir Christopher to say his service. Two sets of vestments (long since out of hiding) were being repaired, and the wardens paid … for a makeshift crucifix while a better one was carved. … They also packed up their English Bible and their copy of Erasmus’ Paraphrases, and sent it by carrier to Exeter to be handed over to the authorities there. …

Best of all, confident that the Marian restoration was here to stay, parishioners and neighbours now brought out of hiding the flotsam rescued from the Edwardine purge of imagery. Sir Christopher himself gave back the painted cloth with the picture of his patroness St Sidwell, John Williams of Bury produced an image of Mary …. William Morsse at Loyton returned the figure of John from the Rood group, the widow Jordan gave `tralis and Knottis’, and `of diverse wother perssons here was rescevyd pagynttis and bokis and diversse wother thyngis concernyng our rowde lowfth’. The vicar was enchanted: `lyke tru and faythefull crystyn pepyll this was restoreyd to this churche by the wyche doyngis hyt schowyth that they dyd lyke good catholyke men’.

Here Sir Christopher was perhaps idealising. Not everyone who returned goods to Morebath church was motivated by pure zeal for the Catholic truth. Edward Rumbelow, executor for small legacies to the church from his father and from Roger Budd, donated a valuable tunicle (not necessarily originally belonging to Morebath), which more than covered those legacies, but he wanted the church to reimburse him for the difference … John Williams of Bury expected to be paid for having kept safe so many of the parish’s endangered images: he nagged on about this, and seems to have threatened to pursue the matter in the episcopal courts. ….

But there were plenty of less mercenary gifts to maintain the priest’s sense of a returning tide of piety: the legacy of a coat from Roger Don at Exebridge `to be prayed for’, 6/8d from Thomas Stevyn of Clotworthy towards the altar crucifix and for painting the ceiling over the Sacrament, a pair of altar cloths from John Norman at Court, another altar cloth from Elizabeth Yondyll of Bampton, all in 1556. In the following year the Young Men and the Maidens … once more collected round the parish to paint the ceiling of honour above the high altar. Recording it all, Sir Christopher is careful to underline the pious motives behind these benefactions: the young men and the wives have money in store `of devocion’, the wives buy a manual `of there benevolence’, the young men paint the ceiling over the altar `of there owne frewyll’, John Norman makes up a shortfall of 9d for a mended censer `of his owne devocion’. And alongside the giving, the continuing scramble to keep pace with the pressure from the diocesan and crown authorities to hurry the restoration of full Catholic worship. ….

Etter disse fem årene med katolsk styre, ble England protestantisk igjen. Sir Christopher (som de fleste andre katolske prester) føyde seg etter alle bestemmelser, og da han døde i 1574, ble han etter eget ønske begravd i koret, mellom stedet der høyalteret hadde stått og det nye kommunionsbordet.

Eamon Duffy beskriver (på s 152) i sin bok «The Voices of Morebath» hva som skjedde da den katolske Mary ble dronning i England i juli 1553:

When news of the accession of Queen Mary reached Exeter at the end of the third week in July 1553, Bishop Coverdale was preaching to the citizens in the cathedral. As the whisper that England now had a Catholic monarch travelled round the building, the congregation stood up one by one and walked out, until none but a `a few Godly men’ were left to listen.’ It was a foreshadowing of the imminent evaporation of the gains which the Reformation had made in the West Country over the previous six years. There were by now, of course, many convinced Protestants in the region — among the gentry of Devon, like Peter Carew and Walter Raleigh, among the citizens of the city and market towns, like John Midwinter, who was to serve as Mayor of Exeter in 1554-55 despite having been a committed and active `proffessor of the ghosple’ under Edward; he was one of several such in Exeter.. There were even Protestants among the peasantry. Only one heretic was burned in the diocese in Mary’s reign, a Cornish woman from Launceston, Agnes Priest. …

… As the reign progressed, West Country Protestants in general found themselves members of a small and increasingly beleaguered minority, and even the convinced did not prove stout-hearted. … The Exeter parish of St Petroc housed most of the city’s elite. William Herne, their priest since 1528, had been sincerely converted to the new learning, and his parish led the rest in adopting the teaching and practices of Protestantism. A close friend of Alderman Midwinter’s, Herne told him in Edward’s reign that he would rather be torn apart by wild horses than say the Mass again.

Herne was no isolated figure: about seventy clergy, i 5% of the total number in the diocese, had married in Edward’s reign: these men must have subscribed to some at least of the teachings of the Reformation. All of them were now ejected from their livings by the diocesan authorities, but a third put away their wives, did public penance and found another benefice, where they functioned once more as Catholic priests (though at least half of those who did so were reported to be secretly consorting with their wives). …

Jeg har nettopp lest ferdig Eamon Duffys bok «The Voices of Morebath», som han skrev en del år etter sin enda mer berømte «The Stripping of the Altars» (som jeg også har kjøpt og skal lese snart). I denne nyere boka skriver Duffy om hvordan en landsby i sør-vest England opplevde reformasjonsårene. På amazon.co.uk kan vi lese følgende om boka:

In this text a Reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep-farming village where 33 families worked the difficult land on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath’s conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath’s only priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric and talkative, Sir Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-reformation piety of a 16th-century English village. The work also offers a window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed. Sir Christopher Trychay’s accounts provide direct evidence of the motives which drove hitherto law-abiding West-Country communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of 1549 – culminating in the siege of Exeter which ended in bloody defeat and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents the changes in the community: reluctantly Protestant, no longer focused on the religious life of the parish church, and increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of taxes.

Reformasjonen skjedde i flere omganger i England, fra midten av 1530-tallet under kong Henry VIII (som ble mindre streng i sin reformasjonsiver etter hvert), reformasjonen ble mer intens under hans mindreårige sønn, kong Edward, så hadde man 5 1/2 katolske år under dronning Mary, fra 1553, før den protestantiske tro festet grepet fullstendig i løpet av de mange årene dronning Elisabeth styrte landet. Eamon Duffy skriver hvordan dette påvirket den lille landsbyen Moreabeth, og skriver slik (på s 118) om det som skjedde da kong Edward overtok styret i 1547:

The Injunctions of 1547 looked like a somewhat expanded reissue of those of 1538: in reality they were a charter for revolution. They did incorporate the 1538 material, but in their new form all the qualifications and ambiguities that might give shelter to traditionalist religious practices were systematically edited out. Whereas in 1538 the recitation of the rosary was condemned if done superstitiously or without understanding, `saying over a number of beads not understood or minded upon’, now `praying upon beads’, the most basic form of lay Catholic piety, represented by the beads at the girdle of every matron in Morebath, was rejected absolutely, along with all `suchlike superstition’.

All processions were now forbidden, rendering redundant at a stroke the banners and streamers which Morebath had been investing in since the 1538 Injunctions had halted their spending on images. The new Injunctions ordered the destruction not only of all abused statues and shrines, but even of such images in stained glass windows, an advance towards an absolute ban on imagery almost without parallel in protestant Europe. The 1538 Injunctions had permitted lights before the Rood and the Sepulchre, … but for convinced Protestants, lights about the Sepulchre or the Crucifix were if anything grosser manifestations of idolatry than lights before the lesser images of saints. The 1547 Injunctions now banned all lights or candles anywhere in the church except the two on the high altar. …

Ardent Protestants now had the mandate they needed for an all-out onslaught on the forms of traditional religion. In London, evangelicals began a wholesale purge of all the images in the city churches and in St Paul’s. Initially the Council, worried about the dangers of unrest in the city, tried to halt such action, but in November the Commissioners accepted these radical initiatives, and supervised the removal of all the images in St Paul’s, including the great crucifix. In February 1548 Somerset and the Privy Council extended the total ban on all images to the country at large, on the tongue-in-cheek pretext that this would calm `strife and contention’ in the parishes. ….