The Voices of Morebath by Eamon Duffy

Author:Eamon Duffy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0 300 09825 1
Publisher: Yale University Press

to see an order taken after their conscience for the gathering of the Tenth and Fifteenth for ever hereafter: what every man should pay for his part and again they should see every man was conscientiously paid of all such duties as had been paid for the wellbeing of the parish before this day and these aforesaid men to make a sett after their conscience that may pay such demands … (deliberation taken).

The summer of 1547 provided the priest with one last set-piece occasion in which to display and celebrate the values by which his parish had conducted itself for a generation. The boy king was an ardent protestant, surrounded by protestant advisers and guardians. The evangelical party was now triumphant in Court and Capital, and a floodtide of religious revolution was about to be loosed on England. The nation knew it. Rumour was rife, ‘secretly spread abroad by uncertain authors, in markets, fairs and ale-houses … of innovations and changes in religion and ceremonies of the Church feigned to be done and appointed by the king's highness'. Protector Somerset and the Privy Council indignantly denied it all, but got on with planning precisely what they denied.16 In May, a Royal Visitation on the model established by Cromwell was announced, the first since his fall, and the regional panels of Commissioners, handpicked by Cranmer, and protestants to a man, made it abundantly clear what its character was to be: inevitably, Dean Heynes of Exeter was prominent among those chosen for the West Country.17 But then, mysteriously, preparations for the Visitation stalled, and the weeks went by with no further action. In an atmosphere poisoned by local confrontations between conservatives and evangelicals, England held its breath.18

In Morebath, however, a more expansive air prevailed, if only briefly, for in July 1547 a twenty-year wait had come to a joyful end. Twenty years of painfully slow saving, the dribbling in of the priest's meagre wool-tithe, the sixpences and shillings coaxed from dying parishioners, the negotiations with executors and widows to divert bequests to this project above others, the formulaic reporting at every year's sheep-count of the snail-like progress of the fund: after all that, the priest now had enough money to buy the black vestments he had coveted for the whole of his time in the parish. He was beside himself with pleasure. Harry Hurley, who had been elected by the parish in 1528 to keep the black vestment fund, had died the previous year, a Moses destined never to see the promised land. He donated the 6/8d for his burial in the church to the fund he had kept so long, and Sir Christopher himself took charge. He travelled the twenty-five miles around the edge of the Moor to Dunster, on the Somerset coast, to the workshop of Sir Thomas Schorcum, the priest who made the vestments, then sent them by carrier twenty-five miles in the opposite direction to Exeter to be blessed by the bishop. By mid-July they had been ‘recaryd' to Morebath, and everything was ready.

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