Until quite recently, most historians took a somewhat negative view of the spiritual condition of the late medieval church in England. The speed and relative ease with which the Reformation swept away the fabric of established Catholic order, so the argument ran, reflected the unpopularity and weakness of the traditional church.1 Adopting the views of sixteenth-century reformers, historians considered that the medieval church had lost its way, burying the truth of the gospels under a morass of vain and empty rituals and beliefs that had no authority in scripture, and that when radical changes in religion were set in motion, most people were only too keen to reject the old order for the new. While those working in this field still debate keenly the relative level of success that the Reformation enjoyed in different parts of the country, historians have increasingly regarded the religious changes of the sixteenth century as being neither popular nor inevitable; on the contrary, they have now come to a broad consensus that sees such changes as both generally unpopular and unexpected. It was Jack Scarisbrick who, in 1984, first developed this view.2 According to Scarisbrick, the Reformation was simply an act of state, vigorously and sometimes forcibly imposed on the people by the crown and certain key members of the clerical hierarchy, yet it was a movement that had very few advocates among the population at large. Scarisbrick’s work focused primarily on the process of the Reformation itself, and he left to others the task of improving our understanding of the pre-Reformation scene. The study that filled this lacuna in historiography was Eamon Duffy’s magisterial survey of the period, published in 1992.3 Duffy argues that the pre-Reformation church was a popular and vibrant institution and that the vast majority of the faithful found within it a satisfying variety of religious practices and observances. At the heart of the religion of the late medieval laity, which Duffy describes in such moving detail, was a set of shared and communal values which bound together not only communities of the living but, through the doctrine of Purgatory and the value placed on intercession, those of the living with the dead. The broad ‘revisionist’ vision of Scarisbrick and Duffy is accepted by most other historians in this field, although some scholars have noted a few reservations or modifications of their views. Historians such as Andrew Brown and Katherine French have, through their detailed surveys of particular English dioceses (i. e., Salisbury and Bath and Wells), pointed to the significance of regional and also local variations in piety during the middle ages.4 Thus, what may have been the case in medieval East Anglia, a wealthy part of the country during the middle ages from which Duffy draws much of his source material, may not have been so elsewhere, particularly in poorer localities where less wealth influenced the development of fewer, or different, forms of religious expression.
As historians have become increasingly preoccupied with the study of religious experience, rather than with the church as an institutional body, a number of terms, such as ‘popular religion’, ‘traditional religion’ or ‘lay piety’, have become fashionable but, while having some merit, these terms need to be applied cautiously. ‘Popular religion’ is sometimes used by historians to describe the religious experiences and values of the broad mass of the population rather than those that were prescribed and defined by the social or clerical elites. However, the term ‘popular’ tends to imply that there was a significant gulf between elite and non-elite religious values, or that, somehow, elite religion was deemed ‘unpopular’ by the majority. Such an elite/ popular division in fact seems much too artificial given the broadly shared spiritual values and beliefs which historians have detected as existing across all sections of medieval society. The term ‘traditional religion’ is also somewhat dubious, suggesting as it does the existence of timeless and immemorial forms of piety when in reality, over time, many different forms of devotion came into fashion while older ones either gently declined or fell out of use altogether. ‘Lay piety’ appears to be a little more harmless, but it should be made clear that by using such a term, it is not meant to indicate some implicit fundamental dichotomy or inherent tension between forms of lay and clerical religion. Again, the close interaction of the clergy and laity in participation in the founding or running of (say) chantries and parish guilds suggests that there was nothing specifically ‘lay’ or ‘clerical’ about certain key aspects of religion.
It is not possible to draw attention here to every aspect of lay religious practice or belief in the period 1100-1500. Instead, this survey will focus more on topics which historians currently find interesting or particularly problematic and which, in turn, touch upon wider issues of contemporary scholarly debate. The themes addressed by this chapter are the changes in the nature of piety over the course of the period under discussion, the aspects of religion which the laity of the middle ages appeared to find most satisfying and fulfilling, and the role that was played by subordinate or marginal groups in society, such as women and heretics.
World History
