Leyes y Códigos

This section will discuss the key lines of interpretation that have driven the historiography of the English Reformation since the beginning of the twentieth century. In her seminal work on the debates about the English Reformation

Rosemary O’Day begins with the work of Alfred Pollard (1869-1948).⁵⁵ For O’Day, more recent interpretations, at least as of 1986, were in one way or another either expansions of or reactions against Pollard’s groundbreaking thesis.⁵⁶

54 Trapman, op cit, 769-772.

55 Rosemary O’Day, The Debates on the English Reformation (New York: Methuen & Co., 1986), 102f.

56Ibid.

The dawn of the twentieth century ushered in a new breed of historians, scholars who were anxious to develop a more scientific approach to historical writing and research. Their emphasis was to apply detailed research and objective analysis to original archival materials. They also had the luxury of having published primary sources that earlier historians had lacked. For Pollard ‘s 1902 biography of Henry VIII, for example, these sources included The Letters and Papers of Henry VIII and the volumes of the Camden Society.⁵⁷

Prior to Pollard, the raging historiographical debate had been over the morality of the English Reformation. Scholars were divided over whether the Reformation, broadly considered, was a positive or a negative thing. These debates continue to flare up in latter day English Reformation historiography, especially with respect to the Edwardian Reformation. Dairmaid MacCulloch, for example, takes the position that it was a positive thing. Eamon Duffy takes the polar opposite position.⁵⁸ Pollard’s interests, however, lay elsewhere. “Pollard, the historian’s historian, was concerned with the how and why the Reformation occurred.”⁵⁹

Pollard assumed that there was a Reformation policy and that Henry VIII was its architect. His interest, though, was not in the terms of policy itself. Rather, it was in what enabled it to succeed. His thesis was that because the English populace was

57 Ibid, 103.

58Peter Marshall, Reformation England 1480-1642 (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 59.

59 O’Day, op cit, 104.

still weary from the prolonged fifteenth-century civil wars, it was willing to grant Henry vast royal power in exchange for peace and stability. The conclusion he came to was bipartite. On the one hand, Henry was the driving force behind the

Reformation. On the other hand, it succeeded because the people permitted it to succeed. According to O’Day, it is Pollard’s recognition of and appreciation for the importance of public opinion and perception in allowing the Reformation to go forward that distinguishes Pollard’s work from “other purely voluntary accounts.”⁶⁰

There are two additional aspects of Pollard’s work that should be

commented upon. First, he divided Henry’s long reign into two discreet halves. In the first period, from 1514 to 1529, Henry appears as an apprentice to Cardinal Wolsey’s chief minister. In the second period, from 1529 until the king’s death in 1547, Henry emerges as his own confident, self-sufficient prime minister. Pollard’s division is important because Geoffrey Elton wrote against it in the mid-century.⁶¹

Pollard saw the Henrician Reformation in political terms rather than in doctrinal terms. The king was determined to be supreme in his own realm and dominions. His ambitions and aspirations provided the combustible material. The Pope’s foot-dragging on the king’s petition for the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon provided the ignition that led to the Act of Supremacy and the so-called Henrician Reformation. O’Day concludes by saying that Pollard and his disciples saw the Reformation as an extension of Henry’s will, assented to by the

60 Ibid, 105.

61 Ibid, 106, 118.

people and the Parliament, “an interpretation that poses more questions than it answers.”⁶²

Stanley Thomas Bindoff (1908-1980) expanded Pollard’s interpretation by casting Henry as a king who governed, but who was not in complete control of the events that swirled about him. According to Bindoff, once Henry set the Reformation in motion it developed a life of its own. While the king wished to hold to a “via media of his own choosing,” his decentralization of church and state made uniformity impossible and led to religious fractionalism. There is a sense in which Bindoff sought to have his cake and eat it too. On the one hand, he creates an

omnicompetent king who knows what he wants and will stop at nothing to get it. On the other hand, he creates another king, a fallible and flawed king, who can only have what his subjects will permit. His is another interpretation that poses more questions than it answers.⁶³

By mid-century the discipline underwent some changes. According to O’Day, history became more organized and problem centered. The emerging emphasis was not only for historians to ask questions about the past, but also to question the methodology that would be required to answer them. Single source studies were frowned upon. Historians were taught and encouraged to employ a variety of sources in their scholarship, and to approach these sources critically. O’Day notes that there were doctoral theses and scholarly books and articles that contained

62 Ibid, 111.

63 Ibid, 113.

more material in the notes than in the text.⁶⁴ Historians also began embracing other disciplines and methodologies, such as sociology, anthropology, economics and statistics. They also began posing the same questions to the past that these other disciplines were posing to the present.⁶⁵

Geoffrey Elton (1921-1994) shifted English Reformation historiography in a new direction beginning in the late 1940s. His interest lay not in the Reformation per se, but in the work of mid-Tudor government. Elton was one of the first scholars to become expert in sources of central government and administration. In Elton’s view, Henry had no interest in the day-to-day niceties of government administration.

The king was happy to delegate those details and responsibilities to his principal minister, Thomas Cromwell, provided that Cromwell divised and executed policies and procedures that advanced the Crown’s priorities. Moreover, the Act of

Supremacy, he asserts, may be credited to Cromwell because the split with Rome coincided with Cromwell’s appearance on the king’s inner council.⁶⁶

Before Elton wrote, Cromwell had been consistently disparaged as an unimaginative, doctrinaire royal lackey. Under Elton, Cromwell became an efficient and omnicapable minister who worked quietly behind the scenes to create and

64 Ibid, 114-5.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid, 116-119, 123.

implement his own program of reform for church and state government and administration.⁶⁷

Whereas Pollard divided the Henrician reign into two periods, Elton divided it into five shorter periods (1511-14; 1514-29; 1529-31; 1531-41; and, 1541-47).

His argument for doing so was that each time period was radically different from the others, not, as Pollard had argued, because Henry was capable of managing his government, but rather because he was not capable of managing it. Elton concluded that the king was ill suited for the work of government that Pollard had praised him for.⁶⁸ Henry’s “greatness lay in the rapid and accurate interpretation of the

immediate situation, in a dauntless will, and in his choice of advisors; but not in originality, and it is doubtful if he was the architect of anything, least of all the English Reformation.”⁶⁹ In the final analysis, Elton had simply swapped an

omnicompetent king for an omnicompetent minister. Like Pollard, his interpretation poses more questions than it answers.

Having examined O’Day’s analysis of the work of Pollard, Bindoff, and Elton, we can now segue to the historiography of the Reformation proposed by

Christopher Haigh in an article referred to earlier in this introduction. It will be recalled that Haigh proposes a model that has four matrices: a fast paced reformation from above; a slow paced reformation from above; a fast paced

67 Ibid, 116-7.

68 Ibid, 119.

69 Ibid.

reformation from below; and, a slow paced reformation from below. The movements from above and from below are polar opposites that relate to the motivational forces behind the progress of evangelicalism in early modern England.

At one pole the motivation for the evangelical advance is state action. At the

opposite pole the motivation is popular acceptance of and conversion to evangelical doctrine.⁷⁰ The other two matrices speak to the pace of the Reformation in England.

Some historians propose that evangelicalism was well established by the death of Edward VI in 1553. Others suggest a long, drawn out process that continued for decades after the accession of Elizabeth.⁷¹

For the most part, the historians who see the Reformation in England as a fast paced movement motivated from above are political historians and biographers.

For Haigh, Elton is the doyen of this group of historians. In Elton’s work, the Reformation was intitiated in the 1530s as one aspect of Cromwell’s reform of church and state. Cromwell’s religious agenda was two-fold: to nationalize the church, and to eradicate superstition. The changes he was imposing on the populace were initiated, sustained, and enforced from above by the government. He sought to persuade the populace through preaching and propaganda, and legal coercion. The evangelical movement was further advanced after the accession of Edward VI in 1547 through the introduction and imposition of the vernacular liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer (1549 and 1552), the confiscation of church plate and vestments,

70 Haigh (1982), op cit, 995.

71 Ibid.

and sustained preaching campaigns in the towns and villages. Haigh quotes Elton as saying: “The fact is that by 1553 England was almost certainly nearer to being a Protestant country than to anything else.”⁷²

There are weaknesses in the studies that argue for a quickly paced

reformation from above. On the one hand, they are often able to argue persuasively that this form of reformation was well established at the center, notably within the court and in London. On the other hand, their attempt to show that the imposition of the government’s reformation policies in the provinces was successful often falls well short of the mark. The provinces were notoriously conservative and traditional well into Elizabeth’s reign. Haigh notes that a number of recent local studies indicate that there was minimal progress in the provinces. The government needed to rely on local justices and administrators to advance its evangelical priorities. Oftentimes these local agents “proved a block rather than a spur to religious change.”⁷³

Arthur Geoffrey Dickens (1910-2001) is the most influential historian who argues for a rapidly paced reformation from below. In The English Reformation⁷⁴ Dickens argues that the presence of cells of Lollards, English pre-Reformation crypto-Protestants, provided a ready social infrastructure for the rapid

dissemination of evangelical ideas and materials. He further posits that the demise

72 Ibid, 996, citing G.R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England 1509-1558 (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1979).

73 Ibid, 997.

74 A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989).

of the late medieval Catholic Church was imminent by the 1520s and 1530s. The church’s higher clergy, he claims, were too involved in politics and too remote from the people to intervene. The church’s lower clergy were, on average, too poor and ill educated to respond to the challenges posed by the evangelicals. The Reformation proceeded rapidly without opposition. Here we see conversion rather than coercion at work.⁷⁵

There are flaws within this historiographical model as well. First, these studies tend to be constructed from a series of unconnected local studies. The local pictures are clear and well argued, but there are many loose ends with respect to a broader, national picture. The model also rests upon two assumptions that have come under attack by more recent scholarship.

The first assumption is that English people had grown dissatisfied with the late medieval Catholic Church and were therefore open to and yearning for new and alternative religious ideas and practices. Haigh demonstrates that recent

scholarship has demonstrated that late medieval Catholic priests were not, on the whole, either inattentive to their parishioners or negligent in their pastoral

responsibilities. “They seem to have satisfied Tudor villagers, who complained remarkably infrequently about their priests.”⁷⁶ Other studies have likewise shown that many bishops were active pastors and administrators in their dioceses.

75 Haigh, op cit.

76 Ibid, 998, citing Margaret Bowker, The Secular Clergy in the Diocese of Lincoln, 1495-1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Peter Heath, The English Parish Clergy on the Eve of the Reformation (London: Routledge, 1969).

Moreover, other indices, such as the continued regularity and generosity of testamentary bequests to the Church, and the ongoing demand for traditional devotional materials, point to a stable, thriving and ongoing lay participation in Church life. “It is difficult to see, in the early Tudor period, the breach in lay-clerical relations necessary to a “rapid Reformation from below.”⁷⁷

The second assumption of studies that propose a rapid popular reformation from below is that the evangelical message was attractive to the point of being

irresistible, seizing the minds and imaginations of a people that hungered for change.

As Haigh notes, evangelicalism was first and foremost a religion of the Word. There was greater literacy in London and the towns than in the countryside, and the evangelical message had a greater appeal where the people were literate. “We know that in the late sixteenth century tradesmen were five times more likely to be

literate than husbandmen, and that regular and popular preaching was a feature of towns rather than rural parishes.”⁷⁸ So whereas evangelical prosletysing was by and large successful in the towns, it failed utterly in the countryside where the Church’s rituals still met important spiritual needs.⁷⁹ Worshippers in late-medieval England were essentially onlookers, and the Church’s traditional worship gave them much to

77 Ibid, 998-9.

78 Ibid, 999, citing, David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 146, 152.

79 Ibid, p. 1000, citing, David M. Palliser, “Popular Reactions to the Reformation,” 37, 39, 41-2, 46; William J. Shiels, “Religion in Provincial Towns: Innovation and Tradition,” in Felicity Heal and Rosemary O’Day, eds., Church and Society in England: Henry VIII to James I (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1977).

look on: processions, the priest’s gestures and manual acts, especially during the canon of the mass, the elevation of the Eucharistic elements at the sacring, etc. The long-term hoped for goal of the evangelicals in doing away with some of these central features of late-medieval worship was to convert the laity from onlookers to communicants and participants, together with the removal of the superstitious and the superfluous. In the short term, the rural laity remained onlookers with precious little to look on. It was an unwelcome change.⁸⁰

The historians who present what is essentially a slow paced reformation from above include Penry Williams (1925-2013). Williams essentially argues that the statutes of the early Reformation were straw dogs that had little or no bite in the parishes, and that parochial resistence to the evangelical message was only

overcome through years of government directed preaching, propaganda, and prosecution during Elizabeth’s reign.⁸¹ Other studies have shown that the Reformation was slow to catch on in the northern counties, in Sussex, Durham, Northumberland, and Lancashire.⁸²

According to Haigh, the scholars who have argued for a slow paced

Reformation from below include the most sophisticated of the latter-day historians of Puritanism. They include Patrick Collinson (1929-2011) and Margaret Spufford

80 See, for example, Eamon Duffy (1992), op cit, 464-5.

81 Haigh (1982), op cit, p. 1001, citing, Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1979), 253-92.

82Ibid, 1002.

(1935-2014). Collinson proposes a scheme in which Elizabethan Puritanism follows the first political phases of the Reformation. Elizabethan Puritanism for Collinson was the evangelical phase of the English Reformation, introducing evangelicalism in the parishes by way of preaching. It was a long-term enterprise, the goal of which was to create godly communities of committed reformed Christians.⁸³

Spufford investigated the advance of evangelicalism in Cambridgeshire. She noted that there was no popular outcry to the early religious changes imposed by the Crown or Parliament, despite the fact that there were few committed

evangelicals in the villages of Cambridgeshire at that time (i.e. the 1540s). Most parishes did not feel the impact of evangelical reforms until the 1560s, and there is little evidence for these reforms being embraced with enthusiasm until the close of Elizabeth’s long reign.⁸⁴

William Shiels discovered the same pattern, with few exceptions, in Northamptonshire and Rutland. Most parishioners clung to traditional religious allegiences until a decade or so into the reign of Elizabeth. It was the influx of evangelical ministers in the late 1560s that began the shift to evangelicalism.⁸⁵

Haigh opines that the historical studies that propose a slow and arduous reformation process, whether from above or from below, are, to no one’s surprise,

83 Ibid. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).

84 Ibid, citing, Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

85 Ibid.

as flawed as those that propose a rapid reformation. Historians in both camps are prone to constructing arguments based on silence, and arguments from silence are always fraught with danger. Rapid Reformation historians, he says, are given to assuming that a lack of recorded opposition to a given sovereign’s imposition of evangelical reforms suggests a broadly based popular acquiescence, if not assent.

Slow Reformation historians, on the other hand, “are too willing to conclude that an absence of serious recorded heresy under Mary shows that the early Reformation had failed.”⁸⁶

Geographic considerations may have skewed some of these studies. Studies that rely upon data from London and its surrounding counties, such as Essex and Kent, will inevitably describe a Reformation, whether official or popular, that proceeded rapidly. On the other hand, studies based in more remote outlying areas, such as Cornwall, Lancaster and York, will invariably describe a Reformation that proceeded slowly.⁸⁷

Haigh then points to Margaret Bowker’s meticulous research in the diocese of Lincoln as perhaps providing the solution. According to Bowker and Haigh, Lincoln “sprawled across nine counties of midland England and had within it a representative sample of geographical locations.”⁸⁸ The diocese was well administered by the conservative bishop John Longland. It contained areas of

86 Ibid, 1002-3.

87 Ibid, 1003.

88 Ibid.

Lollard influence and important towns. One of the great universities was within the diocese, and the other was near by. “If the early Reformation could be effective, it surely ought to have been in Lincoln.”⁸⁹ But it was not. When Bishop Longland died in 1547, the same year in which Henry VIII died, he left a diocese of conservative clergy and laity. There was no sign of evangelical inroads having been made during the Henrician reign. The Edwardian reforms were simply disruptive and destructive, and did not survive the young king’s death. The ecclesiastical visitations during the Marian restoration found few critics of traditional religion, and little sympathy for evangelicalism. For Haigh, Bowker’s research is likely to shift the weight of

historical opinion toward a recognition that the early phases of the Reformation in England were of limited impact. Evangelicalism did not truly take root and flourish until well into the Elizabethan reign.⁹⁰

Shortly after Bowker’s study a number of historians, working independently,

Shortly after Bowker’s study a number of historians, working independently,

In document Estudio de Impacto Ambiental Ex Post (página 30-45)