Material Interests

Abstract

The factors behind support for the old religion were not only spiritual and emotional but also material. For many sixteenth-century people — though more directly for rural peasants than for townsmen — the most urgent of material concerns was the fertility of their crops. This largely explains the popularity of Rogationtide processions, with their ‘saying of the gospels to the corn in the field … that it should the better grow’. Similar functions were performed by some saint cults. Walstan, Bawburgh’s reaper saint, was revered as ‘the god of their fields in Norfolk, and guide of their harvests’. Bury St Edmunds abbey possessed ‘relics for rain, and certain other superstitious usages for avoiding of weeds growing in corn’. Livestock, too, was protected by relics and images. At Ripon, St Wilfrid’s bones cured cattle. ‘Offer up a candle to St Loys for thy horse, and to St Anthony for thy cattle’, advised a Sussex priest in 1538.¹