The English Reformation 1530 - 1570 by W. J. Sheils

Author:W. J. Sheils [Sheils, W. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Renaissance
ISBN: 9781317880912
Google: EhNEAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 3028403
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1989-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three: Assessment

5 The Impact of the Reformation

The changes in church organisation and belief which have been described answered many of the points made by critics of the early sixteenth-century Church, but by 1570 the story was still far from complete. A Protestant regime had emerged after a generation of struggle between conservatives and reformers, but in the nation at large many people remained indifferent or lukewarm, if not opposed to the settlement. This variety of response was found among all sectors of society: the nobility and gentry, the clergy, the artisans and craftsmen in towns, and the farmers and peasants of the countryside. For the majority of the population it was not the diplomatic consequences of the break with Rome, nor the constitutional implications of the new relationship between Church and State that mattered. Their concerns were more direct: their parish churches and their guilds and fraternities; local shrines and religious houses; the liturgical year with its close associations with the agrarian calendar; and above all the provision of the sacramental ‘rites of passage’, from baptism through marriage and child-bearing to burial. On all these matters the changes between 1530 and 1570 had had a dramatic impact, and the sweeping nature of those changes must have disturbed people’s confidence in the capacity of the Church to provide the one essential required of it, a secure and well-mapped path to salvation. Eventually that path came to be signposted not by the sacraments and intercessory prayers of Catholicism, but by the Bible and preaching of Protestantism. In 1570, however, a confusing mixture of signs existed, and the ultimate triumph of Protestantism could not easily be assumed. The progress of the Reformation varied from place to place, and its acceptance among different groups in society took place at different times. Out of this complex patchwork some broad geographical and social patterns can be discerned, and the story of Protestant evangelisation can be pieced together.

Geography

The long-held assumption of the division of the country into a religiously conservative and economically backward North and West and a Protestant and commercial South and East was based on the records of central government and was supported by the study of major rebellions such as the Pilgrimage of Grace. However, the growth of local studies of the Reformation over the last twenty-five years has challenged and refined that interpretation. Within relatively small areas, such as the counties of Kent, Norfolk and the West Riding, there were divisions between Catholic and Protestant deriving from a variety of causes, some economic, some political, and some concerned with local loyalties and factions (29, 105, 106). Most important of all in accounting for this diversity was the evangelistic effort of the preachers – men like Hugh Latimer, who was sent on a preaching campaign to Bristol in the 1530s and laid the foundations of a Protestant tradition in that western city which survived Marian persecution. In an age without any means of mass communication, when the revolutionary impact of the printing press

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