PARTE TERCERA
2 L A TRAYECTORIA DEL CAPITALISMO EN GRAN BRETAÑA
Most analyses of the lollard legacy in the sixteenth century stop here. After de- tailing the rehabilitation efforts of early evangelicals, whose work became codi- fied in the AM, most historians and literary critics have ended the lollard story in the mid-sixteenth century. There are good reasons for this: Anne Hudson rightly points out that her studies end with sixteenth-century appropriation of lollardy because seventeenth-century writings become entangled with the rise of antiquari- anism, though admitting these movements are hardly mutually exclusive.1 Beyond
this complication, it is easy to assume a simple dichotomous understanding of the lollards in the seventeenth century, according to confessional affiliation. In fact, it was not so clear-cut on either the Catholic or Protestant side.2 The remainder of this thesis will survey the latter. That later Protestants on the whole accepted evangel- ical attempts to redress the lollard reputation meant that these medieval witnesses were considered model subjects and martyrs; this is particularly significant because it made them theological models as well.
1NNT, 154.
2 While Catholics did reject evangelical attempts to rehabilitate the lollards, the ways they
approached this issue is a more complex story than scholars have recognized. See Royal, ‘Catholic Responses to Protestant Polemic on the Lollards’ in Early Modern English Catholicism: Iden- tity, Memory and Counter-Reformation, forthcoming. Cf. Crompton, ‘John Wyclif: A Study in Mythology,’ and Kenny, ‘The Accursed Memory: The Counter-Reformation Reputation of John Wyclif.’
In this section, I will look at the significance of the lollards in terms of the true church, characterized by sacraments correctly administered and the Word properly preached. I will lay the foundation for this with a chapter on the clergy, traditionally responsible for these marks of the godly church, showing that Foxe took few steps to mediate radical lollard assertions about clerical disendowment, episcopal hierarchy, and universal priesthood; then, I will point out the how those assertions became a source of contention for the various religious communities that interpreted this legacy differently. The second and third chapters of this section will turn to lollard ideas about the sacraments and preaching found in AM, focusing less on the interpretive community and more on Foxe’s editorial choices. It parses his decisions and offers clues to why he made them, reassessing the scholarly consensus that he moulded martyrs’ ideas into those consistent with Elizabethan orthodoxy.
This section will show that redeeming the lollards from the taint of sedition and heresy was only the first aspect of their Reformation appropriation. In their records, Foxe found that the lollards critiqued many aspects of the late medieval church, some fundamental in organizing any church, such as priests, rites, and proselyting. More than merely looking at the lollards for their martyrological value, this section gets to the heart of their theological value in the long Reformation. While the previous section looked closely at Foxe and his early evangelical precedents, the remainder of the thesis focuses on the text of AM and its interpretive communities. It will carefully analyze his editorial process, paying close attention to beliefs he omitted, but especially to beliefs he left intact. Each chapter will then go on to discuss the ways late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century readers understood the text and developed interpretive communities that often opposed one another.
Chapter 6: Priesthood and Episcopacy
Introduction
Throughout the lollard narratives of AM, these men and women noted in detail the difference between the beleaguered apostles of the early church and the powerful, wealthy prelates of their own time. This contrast, which fuelled magisterial and radical reformers as well as Catholics, drove Protestants of all stripes to return to the scriptural example of the primitive, pure church. Naturally, Foxe emphasized this parallel concern between lollards and later reformers.
The role of the priest as an intermediary between God and man had developed from Christ’s High Priesthood to the Great Commission of the apostles to an office that, by the early Middle Ages saw a ‘cultural and educational gap between clergy and laity’, as well as a sacramental one.1 The thirteenth century saw decrees from the church concerning the education of the clergy for the cura animarum (Fourth Lat- eran Council), and distinctions between the duties of a rector and his parishioners in the parish church (attributed to Archbishop Robert Winchelsey [1293-1313]).2 The
parish clergymen had the intermediate role of administering the sacraments (includ- ing sole responsibility for offering the mass) and hearing parishioners’ confessions. He also served as the agent between official councils and the laity, charged with disseminating decrees to his flock. By the time of Wyclif’s reforms, parish clergy were also channels to the wider Church and the papacy, a manifest medium between England and Rome.
Long thought to be a major contributor to the success of the Reformation, ‘an- ticlericalism’ (a term that ‘seems to cover any assertive criticism of the clergy’) has been reassessed by the work of Richard A. Cosgrove, Christopher Haigh, and R. N. Swanson, among others.3 These significant articles have shown that English anti-
1WL?, 147.
2Pastors and the Care of Souls in Medieval England, eds. John Shinners and William J. Dohar
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 39, 219.
3R.N. Swanson, ‘Before the Protestant Clergy: The Construction and Deconstruction of Me-
dieval Priesthood,’ in The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe, eds. C. Scott Dixon and Luise Schorn-Schtte (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), quote at 52. Richard A. Cosgrove,
clericalism was not nearly as rampant as once thought, and have also demonstrated that the nineteenth-century organizational term ‘anticlericalism’ in fact has more to tell us about Victorian sentiments than it does about those of pre-Reformation parishioners. J. Patrick Hornbeck has convincingly explained that lollard critiques of the clergy vacillated between two positions: one of hyperclericalism, which ‘sub- scribed to traditional theologies of the priesthood but desired the restoration of ideal standards of behavior among clergymen’, and one of antisacerdotalism, which ‘envi- sion[ed] the abolition of a separate priestly class with the exclusive right to celebrate the sacraments’.4 Hornbeck claims that by using this terminology, historians can
paint a more accurate picture of clerical critique prior to the Reformation. Being persuaded by Hornbeck’s distinctions due to their provision of greater clarity, I will use these terms throughout my discussion of how Foxe mediated lollard conceptions of the clergy.
This chapter will begin by looking at those categories to see how Foxe portrays the priesthood in the lollard narratives, showing that the examples of hyper cler- icalism and literary anticlericalism are in fact overwhelmed by the antisacerdotal material. It will then look at how Foxe presented the lollards’ own views on the priesthood and episcopal hierarchy. It then hones in on two radical concepts in the lollard narratives: clerical disendowment and the notion of temporal possessions more generally, and the idea of episcopacy. It then goes on to demonstrate that these ideas, preserved by Foxe in the AM, offered historical precedents for separatists as well as the Church of England. This chapter shows how quickly the radical lollards were adopted by those frustrated by what they understood to be the slow pace of reform in the English church; related to this, it reveals that the legacy of Foxe him- self was a contested one. Though scholars place Foxe’s unpopularity in the 1630s
‘English Anticlericalism: A Programmatic Assessment,’ in Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds. Peter A. Dykema and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 569-81; Christopher Haigh, ‘Anticlericalism and the English Reformation,’ History 68 (1983): 391-406; R. N. Swanson, ‘Problems of the Priesthood in Pre-Reformation England,’ English Historical Review 105 (1990): 846-69.
as part of the ascendancy of Laudianism, in fact this chapter demonstrates that the Foxean tradition was considered warily by conformists as quickly as the early 1590s.5 It will close by reassessing the notion of a single interpretive community.