Daily Life During The Reformation (9 page)

It has been asserted that the English did not harm ravens
because they believed that the legendary King Arthur had been transformed into
one, and his return was awaited by the people. This belief, in fact, continued
in Wales and Cornwall until almost the end of the nineteenth century.

In 1662, a Scottish woman, Isobel Gowdie, when confessing
to witchcraft, said that crows were a favorite form for witches to take when
traveling at night. The Brothers Grimm, in their collection of German legends,
reported that a man and woman from Luttich were executed in 1610 for traveling
about in the form of wolves while their son accompanied them as a raven.

Cats, especially black ones, have always been a target of
superstition and cruelty and associated with witchcraft and magic. To come
across one at night signified the devil or a witch was nearby. It was believed
that witches transformed themselves into cats in order to cast spells. They
assembled at night and howled, copulated, and fought under the direction of a
huge tomcat thought to be the devil himself. For protection against a cat’s
evil powers, one had to maim it such as breaking its legs. A maimed feline could
not attend the Sabbat or cast spells.

Every year, cats were killed by the thousands in France
into the seventeenth century.

Beliefs related to cats varied from place to place. In
Brittany, if a cat crossed the path of a fisherman, his catch was doomed. In
Anjou, the bread would not rise if a cat entered a bakery.

These animals also figured into folk medicine. To suck the
blood from a freshly amputated tomcat’s tail would help cure bodily wounds
incurred by a fall. For pneumonia, it was beneficial to drink the blood from a
cat’s ear mixed with wine.

Cats were victims in other ways. In London during the
Reformation, a Protestant crowd shaved a cat to resemble a priest after which
they dressed it in priestly vestments, and then hanged it on the gallows at Cheapside.

MINERS AND GHOSTS

Like almost everyone else, miners’ lives were replete with
superstition and magical stories. They were afraid of spirits who lived in the
dark shafts, and tales were abundant of unattached hands carrying candles,
strange voices in the dark warning of cave-ins, and ghostly black dogs
indicating disaster was imminent. Underground, in the flickering candle light,
shadowy apparitions could easily play on the imagination of people raised on
such beliefs.

THE PEASANTS OF LORRAINE

Workers on isolated farms out in the countryside were
particularly prone to terrors of the night in the form of supernatural beings
as well as from ordinary brigands.

In Lorraine, in eastern France, an area lying astride
important crossroads between France and Germany, the people suffered, perhaps
more than most from invading armies, battles, pillage, devastation, and robber
bands of unemployed soldiers. Afflicted by poverty and starvation, they were
also terrorized by their belief in sorcery and evil demons. In addition, they
lived in fear of the Catholic Inquisition whose severe judges were determined
at any cost to root out the causes of evil perpetrated by the devil. Anyone
could be tortured if denounced as a participant in satanic rites.

A magistrate in the town of Nancy, charged with clearing
evil-doers out of the region, boasted to the Cardinal of Lorraine that he had
sent 800 sorcerers to the stake to be burned. Arrogantly, he claimed that his
justice was so effective that 16 people had killed themselves rather than face
him.

In 1602 a judge, M. Boguet, commissioned to destroy nests
of devils said to be in the Jura mountains, repudiated the use of torture to
which he believed the true disciples of the devil would be immune. He studied
carefully the rites of the Sabbat and came to the conclusion that in the Jura,
the devil himself appeared as an enormous black sheep, a candle between his
horns, to preside over the orgies. The sorcerers approached one by one and lit
their candle that burst into long bluish flames. They knelt down and kissed
Satan’s
derriere
. Then came the time of public
confession when the sorcerers told the prince of the underworld of their
exploits since their last meeting together. Those who caused the most wicked
abominations such as having people and their livestock die, the most illnesses,
or the most fruit spoiled were the ones most favored by Satan.

Boguet was greatly struck by the frenetic dances that
sometimes caused women to abort as well as tales that the old men were the most
agile. The judge spared the accused from torture and took care to soften the
inevitable death penalty by recommending that they be strangled before the
flames engulfed them. This judge’s book on sorcery (
Discours des Sorciers
) was studied by many and became
a manual for members of parliament. He decimated the population of the Jura,
and if his own death had not intervened, he may have exterminated the entire
region.

5 - SPREAD OF THE REFORMATION

Religious
reformers made rapid strides in the imperial lands of the Holy Roman Empire,
where the territorial secular rulers were often inclined toward the new
religious point of view as were some members of the Catholic clergy. Reformist
leaders used all means available to condemn and ridicule the Catholic Church
and inform a mostly illiterate society of their beliefs. Besides the printing
presses, woodcuts, engravings, songs, satire, drama, and the pulpit were all
means to instruct the masses.

Interior view of a workshop with
men and boys engaged in various activities in etching, engraving, and printing.

GERMANY

How the religious lives and practices of the people were
disrupted by the anxiety, passion, and upheavals of the time is well
illustrated in the case of Germany.

Local congregations, anxious to hear the new orthodoxy,
pressured their village and town councilors to hire a preacher sympathetic to
the Reformation. Unsympathetic city officials found themselves confronted by an
angry populace.

When no church was available to itinerant evangelists, as was
often the case, they preached in the market place, the churchyard, or wherever
there was a willing audience. Church services were now changing; in some cases,
the preacher allowed questions from the congregation during the sermon.
Elsewhere, clerical garb was not worn. In one case the preacher wore a long red
coat, fashionable shoes, and a Scottish red beret.

In some instances, congregations became unruly; in
Regensburg, a Catholic preacher was heckled during the sermon. In 1524, in Ulm,
a priest who began his sermon with a prayer to the Virgin Mary, was driven out
of the church with vociferous abuse.

Where reforms were accepted by the populace, a once-passive
congregation sometimes turned into an unrestrained shouting match. Disputes
with priests reached the point where town councils forbade public contradiction
of preachers, and city officials everywhere reimposed discipline by prohibiting
anyone from speaking during the Mass.

Even in private homes, evangelical sermons were given, and
peoples’ lives were filled with debating religious issues—the most popular
place being at inns but also at spinning bees, Church ales, on the job site, as
well as in the village square where pamphlets were distributed and read out
loud to any gathering. The dinner table, too, always provided a setting for
conversation on religious topics.

Songs and poems scornful of the orthodox clergy were widely
circulated. Some towns prohibited such activity that could lead to public disorder.
There were cases where crowds of Lutherans would invade a Catholic church and
by singing loudly, attempt to drown out the church music.

Tempers flared in Magdeburg in 1524 when a weaver who sang
Lutheran hymns was imprisoned. Two hundred citizens marched on city hall to
demand his release. A number of German cities passed censorship laws
threatening authors and publishers with fines and imprisonment, forcing their
activities underground.

Hans Haberlin, a lay preacher from the village of
Wiggensbach, was detained in 1526 for unauthorized preaching. At the time of
his arrest he was speaking to a crowd of about eight hundred peasants gathered
in a field. In spite of setbacks and opposition, the Reformation spread
throughout the Holy Roman Empire finding fertile ground in many regions.

THE PROTESTANT MOVEMENT IN SWITZERLAND

The religious movement in Switzerland started under Ulrich
Zwingli, a priest. The Swiss confederation of the time was made up of 13 nearly
autonomous states (or cantons) along with some affiliated states. In Germany
and Switzerland, there was at first agreement on reformist issues, but the
relative independence of the cantons brought on conflicts during the
Reformation when the various regions supported different aspects of doctrine.
Some followers of Zwingli, for example, believing the Reformation too
conservative, moved independently toward more radical ideas.

The movement first spread to the major German speaking
cities such as Zurich, Basel, and Bern, but large numbers of people lived in
villages or hamlets tucked away in the high mountain valleys. These places were
snowbound in winter and the locals had to be self-reliant. Some were reached
only by paths leading ever upward hewn out of the sides of mountains with
precipitous drops to river gorges far below. Vertiginous bridges of stone and
wood crossed over deep abysses 1,000-feet below. The hamlet might consist of a
dozen log houses in a clearing surrounded by dark pine forests where bears
still lurked in the sixteenth century and could be a danger. Snowcapped
mountains loomed all around. Compared to the lowland cities with their
pollution, thieves, noise, periodic plague, and civil regulations, people of
the hamlets lived a serene life in the fresh air with room to expand. They
raised chickens, geese, sheep, goats, and cows; grew vegetables in the short
summer; and pretty much lived by their own resources. Milk, often made into a
soup and cheese were the primary staples. There was no shortage of wood for
fires and warmth and in winter close to the fire on a straw mattress was the best
place to sleep. Most of the mountain peasants were poor, but some with more livestock
and a little money would send their children for some schooling in the valley
towns.

Young children occupied themselves with homemade toys in
the form of puppets, toy soldiers and horses, dolls, throwing rocks at a
target, racing and pole-vaulting, When boys were a little older, perhaps as
young as eight, they became shepherds and took the livestock up higher into the
mountains to the summer pastures. This too was a dangerous life. Shepherds
sometimes became lost when enveloped by dense clouds and fog. Sometimes, bears
after the livestock menaced the guardian, falling rocks and avalanches were
always a threat, a sudden unexpected snow storm could bury the shepherd, and food
and water could run out days away from the hamlet. Sleeping on straw mattresses
teeming with lice and fleas was uncomfortable enough, but if the lice carried
typhus, the shepherd’s life was in danger. Usually barefooted and with little
more than a tunic, the boys from impoverished families had little choice but to
follow in the path of their fathers. There were, of course, some young men who
preferred not to tend sheep and goats in the highlands and left the villages
and hamlets for opportunities in the cities and took their chances on survival.
When work was nowhere to be found, they resorted to stealing chickens and
geese, onions or carrots in the fields, and begging in the streets.

Mountain people were not entirely isolated and would sell
their wool and cheese in the larger villages when weather permitted the journey
into the valleys below, and there they could barter for flour, wine, and
luxuries such as pepper or spices imported from clearing houses in Amsterdam
and brought to the cities and towns of Switzerland by mule carts.

News of the reform movement gradually reached the villages
and hamlets by traders, visiting friends, or relatives. There was generally
some visitor who could read and brought Protestant pamphlets to the outlying
communities.