The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (11 page)

The Church had huge reserves of spiritual power which it dispensed through the sacraments and through indulgences. Christ by His sacrifice had won such an amplitude of merit before God that it might make satisfaction for sin for sinning Christians forever. This, so the Church taught, was the treasury of merit. And who should control it? The Church itself, came the answer; especially its hierarchs, especially the Pope. Though the doctrine of indulgences was complex and disputed, by the end of the middle ages popes were granting remission from all temporal punishments. This was plenary indulgence. The merits acquired from a plenary indulgence could also be applied to benefit souls already in purgatory. Popes declared that plenary indulgences gave remission from both
culpa
, guilt, and
poena
, satisfaction for sin; and not only in this life. By the end of the fifteenth century the Pope was claiming jurisdiction over souls in purgatory as well as over Christians on earth. Some priests were preaching that he could free souls at will. Such indulgences came at a price, spiritual as well as financial.

The hierarchy of the Church mirrored that of the secular realm; with
the Pope as monarch and General Councils as Parliaments; bishops and cardinals as the nobility; through a series of lesser clerical orders down to the priest with cure of souls in the humblest parish. The Church had its own law which intervened widely in people’s lives; its own courts and judges; its own massive administration. Tensions might exist between the institutional Church and the church of believers, the community of the faithful. The religion of the Church and the religion of the people might diverge and, in the cases of the definition of purgatory or the creation of new saints or new feasts, the Church might follow the people as well as the people the Church. Yet none of the faithful could challenge the Church or repudiate its practices without cutting themselves off from the sources of salvation and risking damnation.

Priests lived among their congregations, their ‘ghostly’ children, in the world and of it. Yet they were set apart from the lay society into which they were born by their sacred vocation, by their ordination. Through the sacrament of holy orders they were empowered, by the working of grace, to celebrate all the other sacraments; in the sacrament of penance they could bind and loose from sin; in the sacrament of the Mass they celebrated a sacred mystery. Mediators to God for men, given secret knowledge denied to the laity, they had died to the world in order to imitate Christ and His Apostles. In the Mass there was a resemblance between Christ and the celebrant. Such was the high view of the priesthood, and it had consequences for the laity. The clergy, so Dean Colet reminded them in 1511, were the light of the world, and if their light darkened, so much darker was the rest of the world. By 1530 recruitment to the priesthood in England had reached high levels not seen since the Black Death of the mid fourteenth century. In More’s
Utopia
the priests were of an extraordinary sanctity; it followed that they were very few. In England, they seemed countless. More’s moral was clear. Perhaps 4 per cent of the the total male population was ‘priested’; the only other occupation which employed so many was agriculture (the employment which many joined the priesthood to escape). Whether quite so many had truly died to the world may be doubted.

Priests, with the cure of souls, as guides of moral and spiritual life, preachers, teachers, confessors and celebrants, were supposed to be educated, chaste and charitable themselves. Yet although the Church had a divine mission, as an institution it was profoundly human. Priests were sworn to celibacy, never to have families of their own, but the flesh is weak. The laity revered the vow of celibacy and were shocked when
it was broken, especially when the breaking of it involved the deflowering of a daughter or the adultery of a wife. Since he taught the idea of Christian life as community, and warned of the sins that would fracture it, a priest’s own fall from grace was likely to break the peace of his parish.

In Gaelic Ireland, expectations were different. The Church there had developed in virtual isolation and had never succeeded in transforming marriage and family life to the Catholic pattern of the rest of Europe. In Gaelic society the major professions were hereditary castes, and that included the clergy. Ireland had been resistant to the ethic of clerical celibacy, and here sons followed fathers into the clerical profession. Seeking titles to benefices, the sons needed papal dispensation for their illegitimacy, and were granted it. Between 1449 and 1522 twenty-two sons of bishops were recorded in the lists of dispensation. And Welsh priests had long taken ‘wives’ in defiance of canon law.

Everywhere the relationship between parishioners and priests was likely to be ambivalent, for the relationship was personal and, like other personal relationships, subject to the vagaries of personality, the strains of proximity and complications of financial obligation. The laity were obliged to provide for their priests, and might object where they thought their pastor unworthy. Yet the unworthiness of the priest could never affect the validity of the sacraments, since the true minister was Christ. Because of the sacrament of ordination even the best and wisest layman must always yield place to the most ignorant and venal priest, and clergy had powerful sanctions. In confession, the priest sat in judgement and enjoined penance; at Mass he could exclude those he thought unworthy. The Church might be criticized, its clergy found wanting, but for the faithful there was no salvation outside it, and without the priesthood admitting the laity to the sacraments, immortal souls were lost.

Christian rites and sacraments were central to people’s lives. They created and validated relationships, made new affinities, and sanctioned the passage from one stage of life to another. The sacraments of baptism, marriage and extreme unction sanctified a believer’s birth, marriage and death. Confirmation marked the end of one stage of childhood. The sacrament of ordination allowed the priesthood to celebrate the others. All these sacraments were celebrated only once in a lifetime, but two others – penance and the Mass – regularly brought the sinning Christian closer to God. Baptism and marriage were celebrations, accompanied by feasting, to which kin, friends and neighbours came as witnesses as
well as worshippers. Sacraments were a unifying bond of the community. Or once they were. At the Reformation, the nature and the number of the sacraments changed. Only baptism and the Eucharist stayed as sacraments which were a means to grace, and even their significance was more cautiously defined. Yet the human need for sacraments remained.

The first sacrament in the life of a Christian was baptism. Baptism was the rite that incorporated the newborn child into the Church and Christian society (Christendom), and it was a sacrament of faith. Without baptism there was no salvation, and the unbaptized child was consigned to limbo, forever denied heaven and the beatific vision. Every child was born innocent but with a proclivity to sin which was the inheritance of the Fall, and if unprotected by baptism, a child was prey to the Devil. And the Devil was believed to be a real, not a metaphorical, presence of evil in the world. Within the rite of baptism was a rite of exorcism in which the priest cast out the Devil from the child. Exorcized at the church door, the child was carried into the church to the font and there immersed in baptismal water, anointed with holy oil, and marked on the forehead and breast with the sign of the cross, becoming a member of Christendom, endowed with the promise of salvation and with the duties of the faith. Since baptism was essential for salvation it could in an emergency be administered by anyone. The midwife – the ‘gracewoman’ – knew the effectual words of baptism: ‘I christen thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.’

At baptism, the child was handed by the priest to his godparents as his Christian kindred or
godsibb
. They made vows on the child’s behalf and bound themselves to bring up the child in the ‘ways of God and godly living’. Priests were sometimes asked to act as godfathers, in the hope of true spiritual guidance for the child, but godparents were often chosen more for the help they could give in the ways of this world than of Heaven. Choosing godparents was a way of creating affinity and formalizing friendships, for at baptism not only the child but the child’s parents became related to the godparents. A christening was a time for celebration and thanksgiving, a time to invite friends and neighbours to feast. Another sacrament offered grace to the child: the vows of baptism were reaffirmed in the sacrament of confirmation. Time was when the child had waited until the age of spiritual discretion before confirmation,
but by the early sixteenth century the child was brought from baptism to confirmation as soon as the bishop was available, and long before he or she could rehearse the elements of the faith. Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, was baptized and confirmed when three days old. That a tiny child needed to be protected by a double sacrament shows how much people believed in the power of the sacraments and in the immanence of evil.

One person was notably absent from the christening in church: the infant’s mother. Since before the child’s birth she had been secluded among her women friends, at a lying-in as luxurious as she could afford. Great excitements, or great disappointments, attended the birth of a child. In January 1537 it became known to her friends and servants that Lady Lisle was expecting a baby; a ‘man child’, a Plantagenet heir, they hoped. Night gowns, bonnets, cramp rings and a cradle were ordered. In March John Hutton, governor of the Merchant Adventurers in Flanders, wrote asking her ‘to recommend me to your little boy in your belly, the which I pray God to send into your arms, to your comfort and my lord’s’. By July the baby had not arrived, nor by August; the pregnancy was a false one. Lady Lisle’s ‘very friends’ were sad, and she was distraught. Her servant consoled his mistress in this private tragedy: ‘If it be His pleasure He spareth neither empress, queen, princess nor duchess… good madam, put your whole trust in God, and leave these sorrows.’ Women friends, neighbours and midwives were with the mother at her delivery. In the agonies and danger of labour, a mother implored ‘Our Lady [to] help her in her most need’ and perhaps borrowed a girdle supposedly worn by Our Lady herself; she called upon pilgrimage saints like St Anne of Buxton and, to ease her pains, leant upon the staff of St Modwyn of Burton-upon-Trent. Since every childbed might be a deathbed for both the mother and her child, the mother should be contrite and have confessed, and water must be ready for the urgent christening of the child. Baptism was believed to be essential not only for the child’s soul, but as a preservative to allow the baby to survive and thrive. The newborn child was wrapped tight in swaddling clothes and tucked in a cradle, as though to exchange one womb for another.

The new mother remained secluded, still among women, until a few weeks after the birth, when she was taken, veiled and gazing downwards, by her women friends for her churching or purification. Taboos, usually unspoken, were associated with pregnancy. When, just before Christmas
1553, Anne Williamson dared to enter St Mary Magdalen, Old Fish Street in London ‘unchurched’, ‘contrary to womanhood’, and refused to leave, she horrified the ‘most devout and worthy’ of the parish. The vicar-general ordered her to undergo purification, to sit in the churching pew and to do public penance. The Church might insist that the ceremony was for thanksgiving not for purification, but many people believed otherwise.

Thanksgiving for a safe delivery was certainly due, for at every childbirth the sense of mortality was acute. Making his will, a Somerset husband bequeathed five marks to ‘the child in my wife’s womb, if God fortune it to have christendom and live’. A woman’s risk of death in every pregnancy was perhaps one in a hundred, and she might expect to be pregnant six or seven times in her life. Her child’s prospect of dying in the hours and days and weeks after birth was even greater. There was a name for baptized infants who died within a month of birth; they were called ‘chrisoms’ after the cloth which was tied around the anointed cross on their foreheads. The first year of life was the most dangerous. Between one in six and one in five of all children died before reaching their first birthday. In the unhealthiest times and places infant mortality was higher still. In the crowded slums of St Botolph Aldgate in London in the late sixteenth century of every hundred babies born only about seventy would live to see their first birthday. Endemic infectious diseases – bronchial in the winter, enteric in the summer – carried off the most vulnerable. Perhaps a quarter of all children born between 1550 and 1649 failed to reach the age of ten. Death was not reserved for the old.

Newborn children at any time are most vulnerable, most constantly in need of care if they are to survive. Mothers were advised to breastfeed their own children, in order to inculcate virtue along with their milk, but richer mothers chose to send their children to wet-nurses – often for years, because a child was not weaned until the age of two. Women were taught to keep their children from all danger, not to lay them in their own beds ‘while they be of tender age’, nor leave them near water or fire. Records of coroners’ inquests testify to childhood catastrophes – toddlers falling into fires or wells, falling out of windows – sometimes through parental neglect, but more often not. The experience of infancy and childhood was conditioned by the circumstances of the parents. Children brought up in homes deserted daily by fathers who had to go out to work, and looked after distractedly by mothers who worked at home, spinning or knitting, or in the fields, had a different upbringing
from those children cared for in households where the whole family, and their servants, lived and worked. Children grew up in families, but not in extended families for it was rare for relatives to live together; they were brought up with their parents, brothers and sisters, but not with grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins living in the same house.