A remote village on the edge of Exmoor, Morebath had from 1520 to
1574 a single parish priest, the dedicated and opinionated Sir
Christopher Trychay, who kept detailed parish accounts in which he
also recorded the lives and deeds of his flock. The period covered,
of course, was that of the English Reformation, from Henry VIII's
initial tentative reforms through the harsh Protestantism of Edward
VI and the reversion to Catholicism under Mary to Elizabeth's
establishment of a more moderate, distinctively Anglican religious
settlement. Using Trychay's records as his primary source, Eamon
Duffy - author of the much-acclaimed The Stripping of the Altars -
examines just how the changes affected the people of Morebath, and
how they reacted. Those used to the traditional Protestant account
of corrupt, inaccessible Catholic practices being justly overthrown
will be astonished by the harshness caused by the imposition of the
Reformation and its consequent destruction of a community way of
life, its impact on the unwilling and their eagerness to return to
the old ways under Mary. The shock was financial as well as
spiritual. The local community was faced not only with the
obligatory purchase of new prayer books, service books, bibles and
record books, but had also to raise the 'Five Dole', so called
because it was a minimum #5 - as much as the normal parish income -
to provide money towards equipping the army and for sea defences.
To pay for this, what was left of the church valuables, after the
Commissioners had seized all they could find, had to be sold off,
the equivalent of the village hall stripped, closed down and rented
out. No wonder the countryside rose up in protest. Morebath
financed five young men to join the rebels who surrounded and laid
siege to Exeter in 1549. Not trusting Englishmen to deal with the
rebels, the Government recruited professional foreign mercenaries
to subue them. The peasants were dispersed and 400 were
slaughtered. The Vicar of St Thomas, near Exebridge, who was
considered one of the ringleaders, was hung in his vestments from a
chain to die from exposure and starvation. Duffy's meticulous
research enables us to catch a rare glimpse of 16th-century
religious life as experienced by the poorest of the poor, whose
distress at the constant and inexplicable changes to their familiar
rituals - not to mention the devastation wrought on the fabric of
the church building itself - comes through clearly in this
remarkable account. It is only a shame that Duffy's style is
somewhat on the academic style for the general reader; a more
'popular' version of this masterly work would be widely welcomed.
(Kirkus UK)
In the fifty years between 1530 and 1580, England moved from being
one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a
Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed churches and antipapal
preaching. What was the impact of this religious change in the
countryside? And how did country people feel about the
revolutionary upheavals that transformed their mental and material
worlds under Henry VIII and his three children? In this book a
reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of
Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep farming village on the southern
edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath's conventional archives have
long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the
drama of the English Reformation, Morebath's only priest, Sir
Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the
churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric, and talkative, Sir
Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the
names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a
rare glimpse of the life and pre-Reformation piety of a
sixteenth-century English village. The book also offers a unique
window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed.
Sir Christopher Trychay's accounts provide direct evidence of the
motives which drove the hitherto law-abiding West-Country
communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of
1549 culminating in the siege of Exeter that ended in bloody defeat
and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and
silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the
towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents
the changes in the community, reluctantly Protestant and
increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the
Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of
taxes. Morebath's priest, garrulous to the end of his days,
describes a rural world irrevocably altered and enables us to hear
the voices of his villagers after four hundred years of silence.
General
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