Abstract
The puny mind of the historian, grappling with the almost infinite detail and complexity of the past, seizes with relief upon such simplifications as are to hand. Periodisation, the division of the past into manageable blocks for the purpose of study, is an essential, but dangerous, simplification. Our understanding of politics and religion in the sixteenth century has been bedevilled by the assumption that the period of ‘the English Reformation’ was definitively completed by ‘the Elizabethan Settlement’, leaving only the residual problem of those papists who did not realise that the Reformation struggle was over and they had lost. 1558–9 is too often regarded as a decisive turning-point: students are expected to change their mentors (Elton gives way to Neale), their organising-concepts (‘the Reformation’ gives way to ‘the origins of the Civil War’), and their categories — medieval obscurantism is dead, and we are in the exciting new world of ‘the rise of Puritanism’, ‘the rise of the gentry’, and ‘the winning of the initiative by the House of Commons’.
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Bibliography
Historians of religion in Elizabethan England have generally found it easier to write about the well-recorded militants than about the indecisive or indifferent majority. There are therefore plenty of books about Catholic nonconformists and about Protestant nonconformists, and a few about both: there is useful material in E. Rose, Cases of Conscience: Alternatives Open to Recusants and Puritans (Cambridge, 1975), and the best survey of the two extremes is P. McGrath’s Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I (1967). But Professor McGrath’s book is, not surprisingly, showing its age: both papists and Puritans have been the subjects of controversy and reinterpretation, and the conformists have been brought onto the historical stage. The Elizabethan Church is coming to look rather different, party because of shifts in our understanding of the English Reformation. When the Reformation (in both its legislative and its popular forms) was seen as fast and effective (as in A. G. Dickens’s classic The English Reformation. 1964), it made sense to see the history of Catholicism in Elizabeth’s reign in terms of early decline and later recovery. The monumental presentation of this version was A. O. Meyer, England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth (1915; but see the 1967 reprint, with a critical reassessment by J. Bossy), and Meyer’s outline was refined and supported by A. G. Dickens in ‘The First Stages of Romanist Recusancy in Yorkshire, 1560–1590’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal. XXXV (1943) 157–81, and by
J. A. Bossy in ‘The Character of Elizabethan Catholicism’, P & P. XXI (1962) 39–59.
The most exciting and sophisticated presentation of this view is in J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (1975) — but see the criticism in C. Haigh, The Fall of a Church or the Rise of a Sect? Post-Reformation Catholicism in England’, HJ, XXI (1978) 181–6.
The version of Reformation history presupposed by the present essay (that Reformation statutes were difficult to enforce and that Protestant beliefs were widely resisted) is sketched in C. Haigh, ‘The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation’, HJ, XXV (1982) 995–1007
and given more substance in J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984). Some of the evidence for the survival of Catholic loyalties and conservative preferences into the reign of Elizabeth was collected in H. N. Birt, The Elizabethan Religious Settlement (1907), but local studies have produced much more: see especially the works of J. C. H. Aveling, of which the most accessible are Northern Catholics (1966) and The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from the Reformation to Emancipation (1976); and also C. Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975), R. B. Manning, Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex (Leicester, 1969), K. R. Wark, Elizabethan Recusancy in Cheshire. Chetham Society (1971). An attempt has been made to construct a new framework for the history of Catholicism in this period, in C. Haigh, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, P & P. XCIII (1981) 37–69
and ‘From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England’, TRHS. 5th ser., XXXI (1981 ) 129–47. The second article is thought by some to have been unduly harsh to Jesuit and seminarist missioners; they are treated more sympathetically in P. Caraman, Henry Garnet, 1555–1606, and the Gunpowder Plot (1964); A. Morey, The Catholic Subjects of Elizabeth I (1978); and E. Waugh, Edmund Campion (1935). There are judicious surveys of recent controversies in A. Dures, English Catholicism, 1558–1642 (Harlow, 1983).
Patrick Collinson’s essay in this volume, and many of the works listed in his bibliographical essay, tackle those who responded enthusiastically to Protestantism. Those who were reluctant to throw themselves into the ‘new religion’ have been (unless they became Catholic recusants) much less frequently studied. Professor Collinson has some wise words on them in Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (1983) ch. 1, and The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982) ch. 5; and Keith Thomas has ranged across many aspects of popular belief in his deservedly famous Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). There are few general treatments of parish religion in post-Reformation England — and fewer still that can now be recommended: Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (1982) ch. 7, is a sensitive starting-point. The conflicts between Protestant evangelists and resistant laypeople are best approached through local studies: P. Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent 1500–1640 (Hassocks, Sussex, 1975); W. Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, Mass., 1983) (on Essex); R. B. Manning, Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex (Leicester, 1969); W. J. Sheils, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough. Northants Record Society XXX (1979); C. Haigh, ‘Puritan Evangelism in the Reign of Elizabeth I’, EHR. XCII (1977) 30–58 (Cheshire and Lancs); R. A. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York (1960); and R. C. Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England: A Regional Study of the Diocese of Chester to 1642 (Manchester, 1972). Village studies are also proving illuminating: see M. Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974); and K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (1979). Christopher Haigh is writing a book on the Church of England and its people between 1559 and 1642, but the most suggestive exploration of this theme was published in 1581: George Gifforde’s A Briefe Discourse of Certaine Points of the Religion which is among the Common Sort of Christians which may bee Termed the Countrie Divinitie.
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© 1984 Christopher Haigh
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Haigh, C. (1984). The Church of England, the Catholics and the People. In: Haigh, C. (eds) The Reign of Elizabeth I. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17704-2_9
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