The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English VillageIn the fifty years between 1530 and 1580, England moved from being one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed churches and antipapal preaching. What was the impact of this religious change in the countryside? And how did country people feel about the revolutionary upheavals that transformed their mental and material worlds under Henry VIII and his three children? In this book a reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep farming village on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath's conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath's only priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric, and talkative, Sir Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-Reformation piety of a sixteenth-century English village. The book also offers a unique window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed. Sir Christopher Trychay's accounts provide direct evidence of the motives which drove the hitherto law-abiding West-Country communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of 1549 culminating in the siege of Exeter that ended in bloody defeat and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents the changes in the community, reluctantly Protestant and increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of taxes. Morebath's priest, garrulous to the end of his days, describes a rural world irrevocably altered and enables us to hear the voices of his villagers after four hundred years of silence. |
Contents
A Place Apart I | 1 |
The Voices of Morebath | 17 |
The Pursuit of Peace | 47 |
The Piety of Morebath | 65 |
Banishing Saint Sidwell | 84 |
Morebath Dismantled III | 111 |
Under Two Queens | 153 |
The Wardens of Morebath | 191 |
Notes | 209 |
Other editions - View all
The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village Eamon Duffy No preview available - 2001 |
Common terms and phrases
accounts Alms Light altar auter Bampton Barlinch bequest Binney Bishop boke Cambridge Catholic Chagford chantries church house church sheep churchwardens clergy clerk Combe Commissioners Cornwall cownte Cranmer cult Devon devotional Diocese of Exeter donated Edward England English Reformation Exebridge Exeter Cathedral farms hath Hayne Henry High Wardens iiijd images Injunctions Joan John at Court John Morsse John Norman John Timewell late medieval Lewis Trychay London Loyton MacCulloch Maidens Manor Mary Morebath Morebath church Nicholas Orme paid parish parishioners parysse payd payment piety Pilgrimage of Grace Prayer Book priest Protestant rebellion rebels Record reign religion religious Reports and Transactions ressevyd Royal Rumbelow saints Scely Sir Christopher Trychay Sir Christopher's Somerset St George St Sidwell Sunday Sydenham Thomas Borrage Timewell Tiverton Tudor tyme vicar West Country wether William Hurley William Leddon William Timewell wolde wyche wyll ye schall Young yowe