Fires of Faith by Eamon Duffy

Author:Eamon Duffy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-10828-6
Publisher: Yale University Press

In Lincoln diocese Thomas More, a twenty-four-year-old serving man in Leicester had been reported within days of the commencement of the visitation for irreverent remarks made to a neighbour about the Blessed Sacrament. He had subsequently left Leicester, perhaps to avoid arrest, but was traced to the country, where he was staying with relatives, and brought before Bishop White in St Margaret's Church, Leicester. White quizzed the young man in very concrete terms, asking ‘what is yonder that thou seest aboue the aultar?’ More answered, ‘forsooth I cannot tell what you would haue me to see. I see there fine clothes, with golden tassels, and other gay gere hanging about the pixe. What is within I cannot see.’ Refusing to acknowledge the presence of Christ in the pyx, he was condemned, and burned in Leicester on 26 June.8 That pattern of detection was replicated everywhere.

In Kent, the fierce and sustained campaign against heresy that had sent a stream of dissidents to the fire in the second half of 1555 tailed off in the spring of 1556, but revived once Pole became archbishop, though the executions themselves halted for a while. In his new capacity as archbishop of Canterbury, Pole issued special instructions to his visitors on the detection and pursuit of heresy,9 emphasising the culpability of Cranmer and other clergy in misleading the laity, and offering clemency to all who accepted doctrinal instruction from their catholic pastors.

In a renewed scrutiny, Archdeacon Nicholas Harpsfield had arrested at least fifteen plebeian lay people by the end of May 1556 – servants, sawyers, weavers, labourers. They held a variety of heretical opinions, from denial of the presence of Christ in the eucharist to the rejection of the divinity of Christ or the Holy Spirit. Appallingly, five of those arrested had died in gaol by November 1556: Foxe says they were starved to death by venal gaolers.10 Ten more were burned in January 1557, and a further fourteen in June that year. Pole's accession had perhaps made his Kentish clerical administration more scrupulous in seeking recantations, but there had been no slackening in rigour against the stubborn. Exhaustive returns survive for Harpsfield's continuing visitation of Kent in 1557, and they provide us with an extraordinarily detailed view of the processes of detection from the point of view of the pursuers. Parish by parish, especially in the Weald, where protestantism had many adherents, Harpsfield enquired after the names of anyone who had not made their Easter communion, anyone who absented themselves from church, anyone refusing holy water or holy bread, or ceremonies such as creeping to the cross, and women who refused to confess and receive communion before childbirth. The (mostly plebeian) culprits were summoned before the archdeacon and quizzed on the beliefs underlying their deviant behaviour. Some escaped with a warning and a promise to conform themselves to the unity of the church and participate in sacraments and ceremonies. Their conformity was normally ordered to be certified to the archdeacon by the churchwardens, or in person by the offenders before the heresy commissioners in Canterbury.

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