The Papacy

Abstract

On the eve of its repudiation by Henry VIII, the Pope’s headship was still lauded by traditionalists as ‘the confession and consent of all the world’. He was depicted, with triple crozier and tiara, in parish churches — at St Neot, glass of 1528 shows him blessing the local saint — while his martyred champion, Thomas Becket, was honoured by murals at Breage, Pickering and elsewhere. Parishes still paid their annual ‘Peter’s Pence’: at Morebath each householder contributed a half-penny, and each cottager a farthing. Papal indulgences were often still valued. In 1530 they were being sold in the south-west by agents of a York guild, and one of the popular errors castigated by a reformer in 1531 was the belief that ‘we have redemption through pardons and bulls of Rome’.¹