The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village

"Here we’ve moved from the best-known aspect of the Reformation to the obscure, offshore island of England. It’s not about great events or great individuals. Duffy is best known for writing an important global view of the Reformation in England, The Stripping of the Altars , which appeared in 1992 and tells the whole story of the English Reformation in the 16th century as one of the imposition of Protestant reform and the destruction of a thriving religious culture. I’m a huge fan of Stripping of the Altars , but I decided to choose the Morebath book because, in some ways, I think it’s more interesting. The story, briefly, is that this is a small, rural parish on the edge of Exmoor in North Devon. It’s not a wealthy or important or significant place on the way to anywhere, but we know about it because of the chance survival of its so-called ‘church book.’ This is what is often called elsewhere ‘the churchwarden’s accounts’—records of expenditure and income for the parish. Potentially rather dry sources, really. What makes them very interesting here is that the accounts were kept by the vicar, a man called Sir Christopher Trychay. It’s probably important to explain straightaway that in mediaeval England, ‘Sir’ is the normal form of address for a priest who does not have an advanced university degree. They are not knights, but ordinary parish priests. “It’s a kind of tragic story in that an unexpected event from outside—there doesn’t seem to have been any kind of native Protestantism in Morebath—hits this community almost like a meteor from outer space” Sir Christopher himself keeps the accounts and writes in his own comments at various times over the course of a very long tenure—over 50 years—as vicar of this one parish. It’s a kind of microhistory —which is a jargon term historians use for zooming in on one particular place or one particular episode—but not a typical one. Although other historians have written histories of villages, they’ve tended only to do that when there’s been a whole range of different documents: tax records, lots of wills, all kinds of sources which can be put together to really flesh out the whole functioning of a community. There are other sources of evidence for Morebath, but in the end, it really comes down to this one source. In some ways, Eamon Duffy’s book is a virtuoso exercise in how a historian with the right reserves of imagination—and Duffy is one of the most imaginative historians of the Reformation working today—can wring meaning from a source like that and make it sing. Although Morebath is a pretty unexceptional place, it would be wrong to say that it is ‘typical’ and tells us about how the Reformation was experienced elsewhere. Sometimes, we need to recognise that the search for typicality, for the global picture, is actually a misconceived one, and that where we have insight into individual lives that were lived, it’s part of our responsibility to the past and to the people of the past to try and enter those lives and imaginatively reconstruct them. It’s full of them. It gives us a wonderful insight into the character of Sir Christopher himself, who’s clearly a rather pedantic, fussy sort of figure, often chiding the parishioners for not coming up with the full dues that they’re supposed to be providing. Although Duffy is sometimes criticised for having a rose-tinted view of mediaeval Christianity, that’s a bit unfair. He absolutely recognises that Morebath is not a rural idyll. There are tensions and Sir Christopher does not always see eye-to-eye with his parishioners. He is, nonetheless, a devoted and dutiful priest who takes his obligations to the smooth running of the parish seriously. And it might have been an unexceptional life except for the fact that his tenure of this parish coincides with the extraordinary revolution of the English Reformation, beginning in Henry VIII’s reign but then entering a much more radical phase under Henry’s son Edward VI. There is a tragic element to this. One of Sir Christopher’s pet projects is to get the parish to acquire a new set of funeral vestments. Over many years, through small individual donations, he raises money for a new set of requiem vestments, which are finally ready right at the end of Henry VIII’s reign. Within a few months, under the new regime of Edward VI, the saying of Masses for the dead and the celebrating of traditional Catholic requiems is outlawed. “Although people tend to think of the English Reformation as a rather peaceful process, tell that to the peasants of Devon and Cornwall, who were slaughtered in the thousands in the aftermath of a couple of very one-sided battles in 1549” Another of Sir Christopher’s pet projects is the cult of St. Sidwell, a local Devon saint, very much venerated in Exeter, the local capital city. Promoting the cult of St. Sidwell is something that he does avidly—and indeed we can spot some success in this, because there’s evidence that some local families are starting to call their daughters ‘Sidwell.’ And then, in the middle of his tenure, the veneration of the saints is outlawed too. The devotional and indeed much of the social and cultural life of this small parish had been based around the maintaining of lights—candles burning in front of the several statues of saints in the parish church. Groups of parishioners came together to form what were elsewhere termed guilds or fraternities, but in Morebath were called ‘stores.’ The purpose of these is to pay for the wax to keep these candles burning. The stores were also a kind of social club—there’s a young maiden’s store and a young men’s store. They’re responsible for raising money, usually through the sale of wool from sheep belonging to the church. The economy of the parish is based very heavily on sheep, and these stores organise fundraising and village fair-type events. The religious and social and cultural life of this community are very tightly bound together, so it’s a good reminder that we shouldn’t artificially separate the religious from the social or cultural side of the village. It’s a kind of tragic story in that an unexpected event from outside—there doesn’t seem to have been any kind of native Protestantism in Morebath—hits this community almost like a meteor from outer space. Duffy is generally thought of—along with Christopher Haigh and my predecessor at Warwick, Jack Scarisbrick—as a revisionist historian. In terms of the English Reformation, revisionism is associated with the idea of resistance and rejection of the Reformation. Morebath’s story, as Duffy tells it here, is a different and slightly more interesting one, because the dates of Trychay’s tenure as vicar run across the entire Reformation period. He stays in his post under Henry, Edward, the Catholic Restoration of Mary I, and then the swing back to Protestantism under Queen Elizabeth . It’s a story of conformism, of obeying the rules, of doing what you’re told. Often, conformism is regarded as a mere conformism, or the idea that people didn’t really care about the changes. Yet we know, from the evidence that Duffy brings together, that Trychay was a deeply pious Catholic of a traditional sort. He’s not a martyr, so he’s not one of Brad Gregory’s people. The great majority of people in that time, as in any other period, weren’t the stuff of martyrs. You could if you were being extraordinarily high-minded, see this as a kind of moral cowardice , but I think there are other ways of seeing it too. For Christopher Trychay, serving his vocation as the pastor to the people of Morebath is central to his identity as a Christian priest. He and the parish find ways of navigating, of adapting, of coming to terms with the new religious world, and Trychay—who begins his career as a Catholic priest saying the mass in Latin—ends it as a Protestant minister reciting the services from the English Book of Common Prayer. There probably isn’t any dramatic conversion moment at any point in that story, but nonetheless it is a story of real and genuine change and of how individuals and communities come to terms with it. No, it’s not, and that’s in some ways the central incident in the book. The church book of Morebath, these churchwarden’s accounts, have been known about for a long time. A partial edition was published in about 1900, and other scholars have used them. Duffy himself used them for The Stripping of the Altars . In them, there is a reference to the arming and equipping of five young men of the parish in the summer of 1549. The assumption had always been that they were going to join the Royal Army, which was putting down the rebellion that had broken out in Devon and Cornwall in the early summer of that year, after the old Latin mass was replaced with a new English service book. This was a step too far. We can cope with getting rid of the Pope, but we’re not having our Latin mass replaced by what the rebels called, in their demands, a service that sounds ‘like a Christmas game’— a sort of trivial, festive entertainment. The idea that everybody was desperate to have religious services in their own language, which is one of the clichés about the Reformation, is one we might want to rethink. Once Duffy started looking at the accounts closely, he realised that this didn’t quite add up, and this couldn’t be the Royal Army, but must in fact have been the parish sending five of its young men off to join the rebel army. It’s an extraordinary find. Here in black and white is a record of treason, and part of the reason why historians have misinterpreted it is that there appears to have been some attempt to doctor and change the accounts to hide it. But, Duffy argues, the culture of financial accountability to the parishioners in Morebath is so strong that even this dangerous expenditure had to be formally recorded in the book. It’s a sad story for this community. The 1549 rebellion is very bloodily put down, and the Reformation goes forward. Although people tend to think of the English Reformation as a rather peaceful process, tell that to the peasants of Devon and Cornwall, who were slaughtered in the thousands in the aftermath of a couple of very one-sided battles in 1549. This is really the exception to Morebath’s story of conformity. It’s a moment of trauma and crisis, after which, perhaps, there is a gradual coming to terms."