Destruction from above
Eric Christiansen
THE STRIPPING OF THE ALTARS by Eamon Duffy Yale, £29.95, pp. 704 Sin is where Our Lady sat, Heaven turned is to hell, Satan sits where Our Lord did sway, Walsingham, 0 farewell.
So goes the lament for one of England's great shrines, robbed, wrecked, and ruined in the interests of the government of the day, which few people can have under- stood. There has never been change in England as entire and devastating as that which came to pass between 1535 and 1575: 40 years of intermittent state inter- vention to reduce a thoroughly Catholic country to a state of spiritual confusion and demoralisation from which it has never recovered.
It is easy to overlook the possibility that England today could have been as Catholic in the Roman sense as Ireland became after 1800. If Queen Mary and King Philip had produced a little Alfonso or Ferdinan- do or even an Isabelita, it would have been all up with the Reformation: the parish guide-books would refer to 'damage sus- tained by the fabric in the iconoclastic peri- od (16th century)' and that would be that. However, things being what they are, histo- rians have tried to justify these changes in ways that are presumably intended to cheer up the troops. First, they were described as a victory for religious truth over religious error. Then as a victory for national self- respect against interfering furriners. Twen- ty or 30 years ago, Sir Geoffrey Elton was inviting us to look on these happenings as a masterstroke of statecraft, possibly even as the Nativity scene of the modern bureau- crat. And Professor Dickens was assuring everyone that mediaeval Catholicism was dead anyway, and most of the population were looking forward with keen anticipa- tion to the dawn of a new age. And I think there were still some good old boys who thought it all had something to do with capitalism. Such interpretations have great- ly enriched our lives, although they remind me of the Essex farmer's defence of the horse that came in last at the point-to- point: 'If that had've gone, that would've went.'
This Stripping book takes a different line, and the publisher's hot air might lead you to suppose that it is full of challenging novelty and combative argument; it is even described as an 'iconoclastic study', which is surely not quite the word, unless they mean a 'study in iconoclasm'. Such puffing misleads. Mr Duffy is expressing a view of the vitality of English Catholicism, and of the negative character of the Reformation, which is now common. The strength of his book is that it presents a convincing and detailed picture of that vitality, and of the hammer-blows which destroyed it, and of the effect such changes had on ordinary parishioners.
For he is concerned with parish churches above all, where priest and people, saint and sinner were most familiar with each other. Monks and nuns were still the holy elite, but they have perhaps been over- investigated. It appears from this careful and sympathetic survey of rites, beliefs, guilds, plays, images and paintings, books, wills and cults that well into the 1530s
the vigour, richness and creativity of late mediaeval religion was undiminished, and continued to hold the imagination and elicit the loyalty of the majority of the population.
It was an extraordinarily deep-running cultural consensus, binding all classes and trades and both sexes together within a Catholic system that had taken seven or eight centuries of experiment to mature, but had at last got somewhere.
That is, the country was in a state of con- stant religious activity, through every con- ceivable sort of religious institution, providing for the whole spectrum of human wants and needs, even if only by prohibit- ing many of them. Alongside the living population walked the dead, called to remembrance by a comprehensive industry of commemoration — them on the one hand, and on the other the saints: not 'role- models' as the obtuser sociologists pretend, but super-men and super-women of infinite power applied to the relief of the most triv- ial and transitory ills, the toothache, the lost sixpence and the sick sheep, patrons of the unpatronised in a world where client- age was all. Mr Duffy will have no talk of `folk-religion', the term used for anything that theologians sniff at. To his mind, the magic of the holy-water cures for sick cattle and the field-walks at Rogation-tide was not essentially different from the magic that made the bread into flesh or under- pinned the elaborate bureaucracy of indul- gences and pardons or the election of a pope. The peasant and the peer were unit- ed in what they believed and did in church more than ever before or since.
Of course, if it is true that there were 40 religious guilds in a place like Bodmin alone, the apparatus of orthodoxy must have been overwhelming. It would have been difficult to opt out in most places, and the Lollard heretics seem to have strength- ened rather than undermined the religious consensus by serving it as scapegoats. They read their books in private, when everyone else was parading and demonstrating their piety in public; they only came out in the merciless open to be humiliated and pun- ished. Such would have been the role of the Protestants, too, if it had not been for the patronage of a few well-placed politicians. But that did the trick. Smash the symbols of belief by law, massacre those who protest, and leave that immense weight of social conformity to do the rest: the old religion was proof against anything except subversion from the top. When that subver- sion took the form of vandalising the churches, the defaced images advertised the new theology as they had once pro- claimed the old.
Thus 'iconoclasm was the central sacra- ment of the reform', according to Mr Duffy, and he has no difficulty in finding evidence of a scrap-merchants' bonanza, with hundreds of churchwardens keeping their jobs by 'cutting, hammering, scraping, or melting' the beautiful things they had been buying and treasuring before the last bewildering change of fashion came down from London. Nevertheless, when Bloody Mary became queen, it was clear that 20 years of stop-go reformation had failed. Most parishes set about restoring the mass and repairing the damage, digging out the fonts and images from the dung-hills where they had been hidden, and ordering new sets of primers and catechisms from the printers. At Foxley, in Norfolk, they reassembled the fragments of the rood-loft and crucifix and fitted them together at the points where they had been rather carefully broken; and some of the old mass-books were clearly legible under the thinnest pos- sible crossings-out. Processions and images and print steered the majority of people firmly back to Rome.
In Kent, 'the most Protestant county in England', the archdeacon Harpsfield who visited the churches in 1557 found almost every one of them restored and repainted to some extent, and stocked with the full apparatus of popish worship. The burnings and torture of the heretics seem to have been quite unnecessary as inducements to conform. If it had not been for Queen Eliz- abeth and her bishops, the process of Romanisation would have continued for the foreseeable future. However, the effect 'Look, I'm trying to be civilised about this.' of seeing the sacred turned to junk and back again every few years must in any case have left a sense of spiritual detachment in the mind of the laity. Elizabeth's settlement consisted of setting up ambiguous symbols and promoting a prayer-book that encour- aged decency and order above all. But the best legacy of her reformation was the pew; at last, somewhere for the congregation to sleep. For all Mr Duffy's grand evocation of the vitality of old-time religion, many of his readers may still be counting the bene- fits of torpor.
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