THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH
Elizabethan Episcopal Administration • An Essay in Soci- ology and Politics. By W. P. M. Kennedy. Vol. I.—The Essay. Vols. IL and III.—Visitation Articles and Injunctions, 1575-82 and 1583-1603. (Alcuin Club Collections XXVI. Mowbray and Co., Ltd. £3 3s. the set. Vol. I. separately £1 5s. ) IT is some years now since the Alcuin Club issued two volumes of Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Refor-
mation (1536-75), with an invaluable introductory volume by the Right Rev. Dr. Frere ; and Professor Kennedy, who assisted Dr. Frere to edit these earlier injunctions, now follows them up with a collection of articles for the crucial reign of Elizabeth. His introductory essay, which fills the first volume, serves as a useful indication of the most important contents of the documents, as well is a valuable interpretation of them. In it he begins by tracing the permanent forces which were at work in administration, the most important of them being the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, the Royal • Articles and Injunctions of 1559 which amplified these acts, the " New Kalendar " of 1560 and the Thirty-Nine Articles of • 1563. Other amendments, such as the Table of Prohibited Degrees, the " Confession " of 1561, the Royal Order of the same year, and Parker's Advertisements of 1566 were of lesser importance. He then proceeds to trace and explain the various problems which met the Bishops in administering this body of regulations, under the headings of the parish church, the parish clergy, the laity, the parish officials, and dealings with Puritan and Recusant. Finally a section on Tudor Political Theory sets the whole subject in perspective as part of a Tudor theory of government.
Documents such as these have, indeed, as Professor Kennedy insists, a high political and sociological interest, apart from their narrower interest of detail. They not only throw light upon the administration of ecclesiastical discipline, but they are " a chapter in the history of the Renaissance and Reforma- tion State." The spirit behind them is the spirit of ruins regio cius religio ; England is to be one and uniform, and it is for the national State that allegiance is claimed. This is the principle which lies behind the long struggle over " illegal ornament.," a struggle in which neither extreme, whether Catholic " super- stitions " or Puritan nakedness, received favour and in which there gradually emerged the permanent types of English
parish .church and parish priest. This principle, too, lies
behind the twofold struggle against both Protestant and Recusant, which is excellently illustrated in the documents and analysed by Dr. Kennedy. Studying the problem of nonconformity, diocese by diocese, as it appears in the in- junctions, he draws two general conclusions of importance : first, that the 12d. fine for nonconformity was consistently enforced, and secondly that " in all dealings with noncon- formity from the beginning to the end of the reign, emphasis was laid on popish recusancy to the apparent neglect of Puritanism." The reason is clear : " the rise of Puritanism made a struggle inevitable in politics, sociology, constitutional machinery and theories of State, but it remained a domestic struggle. The repression of recusancy saved England from being towed in the political whirlpools of the Papacy."
The sociological interest of the injunctions is as great as their political interest. Here we see the parish church and its ornaments, and the parish churchyard in which still, as in the Middle Ages, parishioners persist in holding their markets, ;ports and dances and even " frays brawlings and bloodshed " ; Lords of Misrule and Morris Dancers, indeed, presume " unre- verently to enter church and there to dance and play." We sec the parish priest, sometimes learned and sometimes ignorant; sometimes sober and sometimes turning his parsonage into a tippling house and going indecorously clad in " great ruffs; great breeches, Gascogne hose, scalings and like monstrous and unseemly garments. We see the churchwarden, stag- gering under his multifarious duties, and the schoolmaster, now blamed because in Coventry and Lichfield there was much. " obstinate untowardness of divers young gentlemen in religion which doth argue a manifest and most intolerable corruption in their bringing up and in schoolmasters " (truly a hard saying); now ordered to teach the children to pray daily on their way to and from school for increase of learning. We see the laity shepherded into church on Sunday and admonished not to walk about or openly reprove the minister when there. We see them privily clinging to their country superstitions, midwives using 'charms at • time of childbirth, and wise men and women charms to cure man or beast, invocations of wicked spirits, telling where things lost or stolen are become, by key, book, tables, shears, sieves, looking in crystals or any other means casting of figures." Moreover,- the documents throw an interesting sidelight upon the varying theories and legislation on the subject of usury during Eliza- beth's reign. By degrees a picture of Shakespeare's England' begins to form in the reader's mind, little, and bright and clear like a picture in one of the forbidden crystals, one-sided because much of life lay outside the scope of these injunctions, but a living picture for all that.
The historian can have only one cause for regret in closing these carefully edited volumes. It is that they are confined • to episcopal injunctions and articles, whereas it is really impossible to study the subject properly without a supple- mentary collection of the detecta and comperta, which form the evidence upon which a number of the articles were based, and of the records of ecclesiastical courts, which show how far they were carried out.' With the comperta before him, the historian can judge how much of the articles is common form and how . much is carefully framed not merely to enforce general
regulations but to reform particular abuses. We have now four volumes containing all surviving articles for the period 1536 to 1603. Will not Dr. Kennedy give us four supplementary -volumes gathering together such comperta and such records of ecclesiastical courts as survive ? No one is better aware than he of their importance, for he has used a number of them to good effect in his introduction, but they ought to be available for the student side by side with these injunctions. No one would perform this task more admirably than Dr. Kennedy, and if the University of Toronto would spare him to make such researches as he could not carry on from printed sources, and if the Alcuin Club would undertake the publication of these essential supplementary volumes, they would be doing a valuable service to the history of the sixteenth-century Church.
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