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Reformers Conflict and Revisionism The Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Reformers, Conflict, and Revisionism: The Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Hadleigh John Craig The Historical Journal, Vol. 42, No. 1. (Mar., 1999), pp. 1-23. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-246X%28199903%2942%3A1%3C1%3ARCARTR%3E2.0.CO%3B...

Reformers Conflict and Revisionism The Reformation in Sixteenth-Century
Reformers, Conflict, and Revisionism: The Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Hadleigh John Craig The Historical Journal, Vol. 42, No. 1. (Mar., 1999), pp. 1-23. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-246X%28199903%2942%3A1%3C1%3ARCARTR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y The Historical Journal is currently published by Cambridge University Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/cup.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Sat Jul 14 11:43:00 2007 The Historical Journal, qn, I ( ~ g g g ) ,p p 1-23 Printed in the United Kingdom 0 1999 Cambridge University Press R E F O R M E R S , C O N F L I C T , AND R E V I S I O N I S M : T H E R E F O R M A T I O N I N S I X T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y HADLEIGH* J O H N C R A I G Simon Fraser University A B S T R A C T . The cloth-making town of Hadleigh in Suffolk has often been cited in the annals of the English Reformation as a town that early embraced Protestantism apparently effortlessly. This view owes much to John Foxe's famous description of this ' Universitie of the learned', yet a closer examination of the surviving evidence from Hadleigh indicates that the Reformation was as bitterly contested here as it was in many another mid- Tudor community. And the nature of the bitter struggle between the advocates of reform and a group of conservatives in the town mog haveprovedsojierce that the energies for further reform under Elizabeth all but dissipated. There are but few signs that the sleepy town of Hadleigh in Suffolk, nestled in a valley north of the river Stour, was once the twenty-fourth wealthiest town in England.' Few now journey to Hadleigh. The old railway line was taken up years ago and the modern highway disdains to dally as it cuts a swathe north of the town and hurries on to Ipswich. Matters were not always so. In 1530, Hadleigh was an unincorporate market town of middling rank whose prosperous economy was dominated by the cloth trade. A triad of structures located in the heart of the town still stand as testaments to its past importance. The parish church of St Mary with its lead spire that soars to a height of 135 feet, built and embellished by the profits of her native clothiers, dominates this square. Slightly west of the church is the Deanery tower, a surviving gatehouse of an archdeacon's palace and a former seat of ecclesiastical authority in Hadleigh. Completing the triad is the fifteenth-century guildhall lying just south of the church, the physical symbol of the cloth trade that determined Hadleigh's economic health for generations. The square itselfis the churchyard with its tombstones, a fitting stage for an examination of the townsmen of four centuries past, who worshipped in the parish church, decided issues ofcivic and * I wish to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and to thank Patrick Collinson, Tom Freeman, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Peter Northeast, and Marjorie McIntosh for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. An earlier version of this essay was awarded the Archbishop Cranmer prize in the University of Cambridge for 1991. ' W. G. Hoskins, Local h i s toy in England (2nd edn, London, 1g72), p. 239. 2 J O H N CRA IG economic importance in the guildhall, and who were conscious of their privileges as a peculiar of the archbishop of Canterbury.' But the historian who begins an account of the Reformation in Hadleigh churchyard surrounded by these public symbols of church and borough with their familiar elements of ecclesiastical injunctions, the cloth trade, and the role of the guilds may be led astray. A better starting point may be found some distance north of the town on a small piece of unploughed land. There, dwarfed and railed in by the nineteenth-century monument raised by subscription, lies a rough hewn stone with a carved inscription which reads ' I 555 D. Tayler in defending that was good at this plas left his b l ~ d e ' . ~ This clumsy couplet is a useful reminder of the sharpness of the religious struggle waged in this cloth town. It is all too easy, however, to leap from Taylor's monument to the remarkable account of both Hadleigh and Taylor given by the compiler and historian of the martyrs, John F ~ x e . ~ The town of Hadleigh has come to possess a special place in the history of the Reformation in England, made famous by Foxe's description of this 'Universitie of the learned', and echoed by more modern historian^.^ Foxe wrote, The towne of Hadley was one of the fyrst that received the woord of God in all England, at the preaching of Maister Thomas Bilney : by whose industry the Gospel1 of Christ had such gracious successe, and tooke such roote there, that a great number of that parish became exceding well learned in the holy scriptures, as well women as men: so that a man myght have found among them many that had often read the whole Bible thorow, and that could have sayd a great part of S. Paules Epistles by hart, and very well and readely have geven a godly learned sentence in any matter of controversie. Their children and servauntes were also brought up and trayned so diligently in the right knowledge of Gods word, that the whole towne seemed rather an Universitie of the learned, then a towne of Clothmaking, or laboryng people: and that most is to be commended, they were for the more part faithful folowers of Gods word in their l i ~ y n g . ~ Hadleigh's status as a peculiar of the archbishop of Canterbury and a benefice of refuge for some of Cranmer's protCgts and early reformers such as Thomas Rose, Nicholas Shaxton, and most notably Rowland Taylor has lent credence to Foxe's description. Nevertheless, whilst there is no doubting the presence and industry of reformers such as Taylor in Hadleigh, the 'gracious success' of their message is less certain. Foxe was not unaware of troubles in Hadleigh but N. Pevsner, The buildings ofEngland, Suffolk (2nd edn, rev. by E. Radcliffe, London, 1g74), PP; 243-7, Based on a personal visit on a bicycle in the summer of 1990. John Foxe, Acts and monuments (London, 1570), p p 1693-705 The account of Hadleigh appeared first in the 1563 edition, pp. 1065-80. Additional material was incorporated into the 1570 edition. I have quoted from the 1570 edition except where otherwise indicated. John Strype, Memorials of Thomas Cranmer ( 2 vols., Oxford, 1840), I, pp. 603-6; A. G. Dickens, The English R e f o rma t i (London, 1 9 6 4 ) ~ p p 269-70; P. Collinson, 'Godly preachers and zealous magistrates in Elizabethan East Anglia: the roots of dissent', in E. S. Leedham-Green, ed., Religious dissent in East Anglia (Cambridge, ~ g g ~ ) , p. 13. Foxe, Acts and monuments, p. 1693. 3 T H E R E F O RMA T I O N IN HADLE I GH he generally chose to emphasize the triumphant progress of Protestantism and to gloss over less favourable events. Yet the surviving evidence from Hadleigh town records, accounts, wills,7 and even Foxe's own evidence indicate that from 1530 to 1560, the town was bitterly divided over religious issues. This is grist to the mill of historians interested in the issue of social conflict - and its relationship to the process of religious change brought by the sixteenth century. Yet the subject is not without a polemical edge. It has become orthodox among Reformation revisionists to view social relations before the Reformation as essentially harmonious, cemented together by the reconciling activities of the parish priest and institutions such as guilds and fraternities and demonstrated in the festive and charitable rituals of rogationtide processions, church ales, the distribution of holy bread, and kissing the pax. This is held in stark contrast to the divisiveness of Protestantism, an unattractively complex creed that abolished these rituals as tainted by superstition, contributed to conflicts and disputes in towns and villages, and that carried the seeds ofits own destruction in the implicit notion of a gathered church and the explicit presence of precisians and puritan^.^ Such arguments raise larger questions than can be dealt with here. Until more work is done on the incidence, role, and function of conflict in the late medieval period, we have no way of telling whether the sixteenth century saw a rise in the cases of conflict and the part played by the new theology. Parishioners in 1520 may not have been arguing over sermons preached on predestination but some can be found vigorously contesting the very symbols and rituals that emphasized the harmony of Catholic Christendom. In 1522 a parishioner of Theydon-Gernon in Essex smashed the pax over the head of the offending clerk who had dared to offer it to another man first.g Sir Thomas More, in a similar vein, could speak of 'how men fell at varyaunce for kissing ' Hadleigh records are currently retained by the town in the guildhall in Hadleigh. I am grateful to the late Mr W. A. B. Jones and Mr Cyril Cook for making the records available to me. Most Hadleigh wills are kept at the Public Record Office or at the Essex Record Office. I am grateful to Peter Northeast and Marjorie McIntosh for letting me read their transcriptions of earlier and later Hadleigh wills respectively. These sentiments are explicit in J.J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the Englishpeople (Oxford, 1984);Scarisbrick's review of Collinson, The birthpangs of Protestant England (London, 1989),Times Literary Supplement, 28 July - 3 August 1989,p. 829; C. Haigh, 'Anticlericalism and the English Reformation', in C. Haigh, ed., The English Reformation revised (Cambridge, 1987)~pp. 56-74; C. Haigh, 'The Church of England, the Catholics and the people', in C. Haigh, ed., The reign of Elizabeth I (London, 1984)~p p 195-2 19; and, to a lesser extent, implicit in Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989),esp pp. 628-39. For this interpretation from the late medieval perspective, see C. Harper-Bill, The pre-Reformation church in England, rqoer530 (London, 1989). The altercation took place on 'Allhallows day, after the elevation of the Host' when the parish clerk, Richard Pond, 'presented the pax to Mr Francis Hampden, patron of the church, and Margery, his wife and then to Mr John Browne, gent., who took it, kissed it and then broke it in two pieces over the head of the said Richard Pond, causing streams of blood to run to the ground. O n the previous Sunday Browne had said, "Clerke, if thow here after gevist not me the pax first I shall breke it on thy hedd."' hT.C. Waller, ed., 'Some additions to Newcourt's Repertorium, vol. 11, being notes made by J. C. Challenor Smith', Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, 7 (1902),p. I 75. I owe this reference to Mr M. O'Boy. 4 J O H N CRA IG of the pax, or goyng before in procession or setting of their wives pewes in the church'.'' Rituals such as the distribution of holy bread or the kissing of the pax were not simply moments of Christian charity but also important reflections and reinforcements of the social hierarchy and thus moments of exclusivity as well as in~lusivit~.' ' Rogationtide processions may have been an expression of parochial harmony but the practice also ensured that the boundaries of the parish were remembered and retained, practical considerations that possessed important and potentially divisive implications for the payment of tithe.'' Clearly, there is much that is unbalanced and naive in a stark contrast between late medieval unity and early modern fragmentation. Nor was it the case, in towns and villages across the country, as the structures of penance and purgatory confronted ideas of imputed righteousness and the activities of iconoclasts, that the necessav result was social conflict. Determining the religious persuasion of a town certainly could be a cause of conflict but perhaps no more so than the contentious issues of municipal office holding or town finance. Professor MacCaffrey has argued that in spite of widely divergent religious opinions among the ruling elite in Exeter, they were 'not an occasion for major social disagreement'. The town of Bury St Edmunds actually functioned quietly throughout the turbulent years of mid-Tudor change. It was not until the combined pressure of Bishop Freke's anti-puritan policy, and the aggressive tactics of a group of radical Brownists, that divisions in the town broke out in the early 1580s. And despite the undoubted conservatism of most aldermen in York, clashes among the councillors seem to have been limited to squabbles over the staging of morality plays in the 1 ~ 7 0 s . ' ~ The experience of Hadleigh, however, was quite different. Cranmer's policy of using this peculiar as a refuge for reforming preachers aroused strong opposition from some of the inhabitants. And their opposition was not without success. Of the four men known to have laboured in Hadleigh -Bilney, Rose, Shaxton and Taylor - two were burnt, one arrested and prohibited from the town, and one recanted. Eventually Protestantism triumphed, but the bitter struggle in Hadleigh lo W. E. Campbell, ed., The English works o f s i r Thomas More ( 2 vols., London, 1g31), p. 8 8 Cf. H. Maynard Smith, Pre-Reformation England (London, 1963), pp. 9&8; J. Bossy, 'Blood and baptism, kinship, community and Christianity in Western Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries', in D. Baker, ed., Sanctity andsecularity: the church and the world (Oxford, 1973)~ PP. 129-43. 'I Cf. the orders for deacons in Holy Trinity church, Coventry, 1462, 'ye sayd dekyn schall se ye woly [holy] cake every sonday be kyte a quordyng [cut according] for every mans degre'. British Magazine, 6 (1834), p. 262. l2 This practice may have been more divisive in urban rather than rural parishes. Cf. the case brought by the parish of All Saints, Canterbury, against Mr Henry Lawse, who claimed that his house attached to the hospital of Eastbridge alias Kingsbridge was exempt from the payment of tithe. During rogationtide processions, parishioners from All Saints marked his house with ' a great letter Roman A' which Lawse promptly rubbed out. Canterbury Cathedral Archives, x. 11. 11. fos. I 7v-26v I owe this reference to Patrick Collinson. l3 W. MacCaffrey, Exeter, 154e1640 (London, 1g75), p p 174-202; J. S. Craig, 'Reformation, politics and polemics in sixteenth century East Anglian market towns' (Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge, 1992)~ ch. 4; D. Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford, 1g7g), pp. 22&5g. 5 T H E REFORMAT ION I N H AD L E I G H between the advocates of reform and a group of conservatives was a central feature of the town's life for three decades. This is important for at least two reasons. The first is that, thanks largely to Foxe, Hadleigh is often idealized as the archetype ofthe Protestant town, a cloth town that embraced Protestantism apparently effortlessly. Secondly, the evidence for religious conflict in Hadleigh, spotty though it is, allows the historian to trace the story a step further and to ask how matters were resolved and what effect the experience of conflict had upon the religious life of the town. Particular consideration of the labours of the four notable reformers in Hadleigh provides a useful structure for the first part of this essay. The first of these, Thomas Bilney, of Norfolk stock and Cambridge educated, is, without doubt, the most elusive. Neither Lutheran, nor Catholic, recent appraisals have labelled him an Evangelical.14 I t is clear that his most astringent criticisms were directed against pilgrimages and images and his emphasis was upon the sufficiency of Christ's work of redemption, a high view of scripture and of preaching. It was whilst engaged on his first preaching tour of 1526--7 that concentrated upon eastern Suffolk, and Ipswich in particular, that Bilney first came to Hadleigh. Knowledge of Bilney's activities in Hadleigh is scant, derived entirely from Foxe and a single statement in an Act Book of the diocese of Norwich. Foxe implies that Bilney enjoyed more than a passing moment in Hadleigh and this is perhaps corroborated by the testimony of Guye Glason, a shoemaker from Eye, who, caught up in court proceedings against him for speaking against images in 1533, confessed to having learnt his opinions from a sermon that Bilney had preached in Hadleigh in 1527.'~ I t is possible that Bilney's influence in Hadleigh was of a formative character and that he built upon existing clandestine groups of Lollards known to have been active in the Stour valley, but there is no surviving evidence for this supposition.16 It is more likely that Bilney took advantage of Hadleigh's peculiar status in order to work outside the jurisdiction of the disapproving bishop of Norwich. Bilney may well have preached in Hadleigh on his final and fateful preaching tour ' up to Jerusalem' that ended in his execution at Norwich. l4 J. F. Davis, 'The trials ofThomas Bylney and the English Reformation', HistoricalJournal, 24 (1981), p p 775-90; G. Walker, 'Saint or schemer? The 1527 heresy trial of Thomas Bilney reconsidered', Journal ofEcclesiastica1 History, 40 (1989)~ p p 2 1 ~ 3 8 . Norfolk Record Office, Act 4/4b, fos. 33~-7'. Glason confessed that he 'wolde not wurship the Crosse ner the crucyfyxe And if that I hade the Rode that stondeth in the monasterye of Eye in my yerde I wolde brenne it And shyte upon it hed to make it a foote hyegher then it is.' The clerk recorded that Glason ' dicit quad dedint huius opiniones ex sermone Bilneye habuit apud Hadley septemio abhunc'. l6 Cf. Alan Pennie, 'The evolution of Puritan mentality in an Essex cloth town: Dedham and the Stour valley, 156-1640' (Ph.D. dissertation, Sheffield, 1989); Anne Hudson, The premature Reformation (Oxford, 1989)~ pp. 456-83; J.A. F. Thomson, The later Lollards (Oxford, 1965)~ PP. '37-8. - - 6 J O H N CRA IG Although the precise details of Bilney's residence in Hadleigh must remain a matter of conjecture, his preaching, particularly against images, was not without fruit. The most convincing evidence of Bilney's influence in the region of Hadleigh can be seen in the wave of iconoclasm which spread across the Stour valley in the early 1530s.'~ The most notable incident in this wave of protest was the burning of the famed rood of Dovercourt which, as Diarmaid MacCulloch has convincingly argued, was probably carried out as a response to the flames that consumed Bilney the previous summer in Norwich. In 1532, four men, three from the town of Dedham, Robert King, Nicholas Marsh, an
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