Religious Change and the Laity in England

By Nicholas Tyacke | Published in History Today 2008

Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke look at the ways ordinary people responded to religious changes within their places of worship from the Reformation to the Restoration.

According to one very influential modern view of the Reformation era, the heart was ripped out of English popular religion by the measures introduced under Edward VI (r.1547-53) and Elizabeth I (r.1558-1603), when altars and images were destroyed and the Catholic mass was abolished. This is Eamon Duffy’s argument in his famous book The Stripping of the Altars (1992), the findings of which have been broadly endorsed by Christopher Haigh and Ronald Hutton among others; in their view the Reformation was imposed from above on an unwilling people. Another group of historians, led by John Morrill, also claim that when some eighty years later altars were restored under Charles I (r.1625-49) and Archbishop Laud (in office from 1633-45) the move was equally unpopular.
What is the explanation for this seeming contradiction? Was it simply that with the passage of time parishioners had been won over to the new Protestant forms of worship? Or do we require a more sophisticated model of religious change? Instead of Reformation imposed from above or in response to pressure from below, perhaps we should think about the authorities and parishioners actively collaborating either to push for change or to reverse it. Historians have increasingly focused on the laity in the parishes in this respect. But how do we best recover their varied experiences?
The late A.G. Dickens pioneered the study of wills and what they can tell us about the religious views of their makers, while other historians have investigated the literature produced for the more popular end of the market. But both these approaches run into difficulties. The religious language of wills turns out to be full of ambiguity and not readily translatable into either Protestant or Catholic categories. As for cheap print, there are no easy answers as to who the consumers were or what the impact of it was upon them. A more promising approach is to investigate the alterations in parish churches and who was responsible for these. We can also illuminate the process of religious change by studying artefacts of material culture – communion tables, rails, chalices, stained glass and so on – which survive in some number and which most historians have been reluctant to incorporate into their document-centred accounts.

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Tags: Religion,Social,Reformation,Britain,

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