The Eve of the Reformation

The brethren of St. John’s just named, as the chief object of their association, kept a hospital for the poor and sick in the city. They paid a chaplain of their own, as indeed did most of the guilds, and had a master and matron to look after the comfort of the poor. They provided bed and bedding, and carefully administered not only their own subscriptions, but the sums of money freely bequeathed to them to be spent on charity. At every market held within the precincts of Winchester an officer, paid by the society, attended and claimed for the support of the poor a tax of two handfuls of corn from every sack exposed for sale. The mayor and bailiffs were apparently the official custodians of this guild, and numerous legacies in wills, even in the reign of Henry VIII., attest its popularity. For example, on February 19, 1503, John Cornishe, alias Putte, late Mayor of Winchester, died and left to the guardians his tenements and gardens under the penthouse in the city for the charity, on condition that for ten years they would spend 6s. 8d. in keeping his annual obit. In 1520, a draper of London, named Calley, bequeathed ten shillings to the hospital for annually repairing and improving the bedding of the poor. The accounts of this Fraternity of St. John’s Hospital for a considerable period in the fourteenth century are still in existence. They show large receipts, sometimes amounting to over £100, from lands, shops, houses, and from the sale of cattle and farm produce, over and above the annual subscriptions of members. On the other side, week by week we have the payments for food provided for the service of the poor: fish, flesh, beer, and bread are the chief items. One year, for instance, the bread bought for the sick amounted to 36s. 6d.; beer to 36s. 8d.; meat to 32s. 2d.; fish to 28s. 3½d., &c. Besides this seven shillings were expended in mustard, and 3s. 6d. for six gallons of oil. This same year the guardians also paid 2s. 2d. for the clothes and shoes for a young woman named Sibil “who nursed the poor in the hospital.” The above represents only the actual money expended over the sick patients, and from the same source, most minute and curious information might be added as to the other expenses of the house, including, for instance, even the purchase of grave-clothes and coffins for the dead poor, the wages and clothing of the matron and servant, and the payment of the officer who collected the handfuls of corn in the market-place. At times we have evidence of the arrival and care of strange poor people – we should perhaps call them “tramps” in our day. For instance, here is one heading: “The expenses of three poor strangers in the hospital for 21 days and nights, 15¾d.; to each of whom is given ¾d. Item: the expenses of one other for 5 days, 3¾d. Item: the expenses of the burial of the said sick person, 3d. Item: the expenses of four pilgrims lodged for a night, 2d. Item: new straw to stuff the beds of the sick, 8d. Item: paid to the laundress for washing the clothes of the sick during one year, 12d.”

To speak of guilds without making any mention of the feasts – the social meetings – which are invariably associated with such societies, would be impossible. The great banquets of the city companies are proverbial, and, in origin at least, they arose out of the guild meeting for the election of officers, followed by the guild feast. As a rule, these meetings took place on the day on which the Church celebrated the memory of the Saint who had been chosen as patron of the society, and were probably much like the club dinners which are still cherished features of village life in many parts of England.344

It has been said that the wardens of guilds were frequently named in mediæval wills as trustees of money for various charitable purposes. As an example of property thus left to a guild, take the Candlemas Guild, established at Bury St. Edmunds: the society was established in the year 1471, and a few years later one of the members made over to the brethren considerable property for the common purposes of the guild and other specified objects. His name was John Smith, a merchant of Bury, and he died, we are told, on “St. Peter’s even at Midsummer, 1481.” His will, which is witnessed by the Abbot and Prior of St. Edmund’s Abbey, provides, in the first place, for the keeping of an obit “devoutly.” The residue of the income was to accumulate till the appointment of each new abbot, when, on the election, the entire amount was to be paid over to the elect in place of the sum of money the town was bound to pay on every such occasion. Whatever remained over and above this was to be devoted to the payments of any tenth, fifteenth, or other tax, imposed upon the citizens by royal authority. This revenue was to be administered by the guardians of the guild, who were bound at the yearly meeting at Candlemas to render an account of their stewardship. Year by year John Smith’s will was read out at the meeting, and proclamation was made before the anniversary of his death in the following manner: “Let us all of charity pray for the soul of John. We put you in remembrance that you shall not miss the keeping of his Dirge and also of his Mass.” Round about the town the crier was sent to recite the following lines: —

“We put you in remembrance all that the oath have made,To come to the Mass and the Dirge the souls for to glade:All the inhabitants of this town are bound to do the same,To pray for the souls of John and Anne, else they be to blame:The which John afore-rehearsed to this town hath been full kind,Three hundred marks for this town hath paid, no penny unpaid behind.Now we have informed you of John Smith’s will in writing as it is,And for the great gifts that he hath given, God bring his soul to bliss. Amen.”345

The example set by this donor to the Candlemas Guild at Bury was followed by many others in the later part of the fifteenth century. For instance, a “gentlewoman,” as she calls herself, one Margaret Odom, after providing by will for the usual obit and for a lamp to burn before “the holie sacrament in St. James’s Church,” desires that the brethren of the guild shall devote the residue of the income arising from certain houses and lands she has conveyed to their keeping, to paying a priest to “say mass in the chapel of the gaol before the prisoners there, and giving them holy water and holy bread on all Sundays, and to give to the prisoners of the long ward of the said gaol every week seven faggots of wood from Hallowmass (November 1) to Easter Day.”346

Intimately connected with the subject of the guilds is that of the fairs, which formed so great a feature in mediæval commercial life, and at which the craft guilds were represented. For the south of England, the great fair held annually at Winchester became the centre of our national commerce with France. The following account of it is given in Mr. W. J. Ashley’s most interesting Introduction to English Economic History: “A fair for three days on the eastern hill outside Winchester was granted to the bishop by William II.; his immediate successors granted extension of time, until by a charter of Henry II. it was fixed at sixteen days, from 31st August to 15th September. On the morning of 31st August ‘the justiciars of the pavilion of the bishop’ proclaimed the fair on the hilltop, then rode on horseback through the city proclaiming the opening of the fair. The keys of the city and the weighing machine in the wool market were taken possession of, and a special mayor and special bailiffs were appointed to supersede the city officials during the fair time. The hilltop was quickly covered with streets of wooden shops: in one, the merchants from Flanders; in another, those of Caen or some other Norman town; in another, the merchants from Bristol. Here were placed the goldsmiths in a row, and there the drapers, &c., whilst around the whole was a wooden palisade with guarded entrance, a precaution which did not always prevent enterprising adventurers from escaping payment of the toll by digging a way in for themselves under the wall… In Winchester all trade was compulsorily suspended, and within ‘a seven league circuit,’ guards being stationed at outlying posts, on bridges and other places of passage, to see that the monopoly was not infringed. At Southampton nothing was to be sold during the fair time but victuals, and even the very craftsmen of Winchester were bound to transfer themselves to the hill and there carry on their occupations during the fair. There was a graduated scale of tolls and duties: all merchants of London, Winchester, or Wallingford who entered during the first week were free from entrance tolls… In every fair there was a court of pie-powder (of dusty feet) in which was decided by merchant law all cases of dispute that might arise, the ordinary jurisdiction being for a time suspended in the town; at Winchester this was called the Pavilion Court. Hither the bishop’s servants brought all the weights and measures to be tested; here the justices determined on an assize, or fixed scale, for bread, wine, beer, and other victuals, adjudging to the pillory any baker whose bread was found to be of defective weight; and here every day disputes between merchants as to debts were decided by juries upon production and comparison of the notched wooden tallies.”347

A few words must be said about the final destruction of the English guilds. At the close of the reign of Henry VIII. an act of Parliament was passed vesting the property of colleges, chantries, fraternities, brotherhoods and guilds in the Crown (38 Hen. VIII., c. 4). The king was empowered to send out his commissioners to take possession of all such property, on the plea that it might be “used and exercised to more godly and virtuous purposes.” Henry died before the provisions of the act could be complied with, and a second act was passed through the first Parliament in the reign of Edward VI. (1 Ed. VI., c. 14). This went beyond the former decree of destruction, for after providing for the demolition of colleges, free chapels, and chantries, it proceeded not only separately by name to grant to the king all sums of money devoted “by any manner of corporations, guilds, fraternities, companies or fellowships or mysteries or crafts,” to the support of a priest, obits or lights (which may be taken under colour of religion), but to hand over to the crown “all fraternities, brotherhoods and guilds, being within the realm of England and Wales and other the king’s dominions, and all manors, lands, tenements, and other hereditaments belonging to them, other than such corporations, guilds, fraternities, &c., and the manors, lands, &c., pertaining to the said corporations, &c., above mentioned.”

The Parliament of Henry VIII. assigned as a reason for this seizure of the property of the corporate bodies the need “for the maintenance of these present wars,” and cleverly put into one group “colleges, free chapels, chantries, hospitals, fraternities, brotherhoods, and guilds.” “The act of Edward VI.,” writes Mr. Toulmin Smith, “was still more ingenious, for it held up the dogma of purgatory to abhorrence, and began to hint at grammar schools. The object of both acts was the same. All the possessions of all the guilds (except what could creep out as being mere trading guilds, which saved the London guilds) became vested by these two acts in the Crown; and the unprincipled courtiers who had advised and helped the scheme gorged themselves out of this wholesale plunder of what was, in every sense, public property.”348

It is clear that in seizing the property of the guilds the Crown destroyed far more than it gained for itself. A very large proportion of their revenues was derived from the entrance fees and the annual subscriptions of the existing members, and in putting an end to these societies the State swept away the organisation by which these voluntary subscriptions were raised, and this not in one or two places, but all over England. In this way far more harm was in reality done to the interests of the poor, sick, and aged, and, indeed, to the body politic at large, than the mere seizure of their comparatively little capital, whether in land or money.

It is not, of course, meant to imply that the injury to the poor and sick was not fully recognised at the time of these legal confiscations. People deeply resented the idea that what generations of benefactors had intended for the relief of distress should thus be made to pass into the pocket of some “new” man who had grown great upon the spoils. The literature of the period affords abundant evidence of the popular feeling. Crowley, for instance, wrote about 1550 – just at this very time – and although no one would look for any accurate description of facts in his rhyming satires, he may be taken as a reliable witness as to what the people were saying. This is what he writes on the point: —

“A merchant, that long timeHad been in strange landsReturned to his country,Which in Europe stands.And in his returnHis way lay to passBy a spittle house not far fromWhere his dwelling-house was.He looked for this hospital,But none could he see,For a lordly house was builtWhere the hospital should be.‘Good Lord!’ (said the merchant),‘Is my country so wealthyThat the very beggars’ housesAre built so gorgeously?’Then by the waysideHim chanced to seeA poor man that cravedOf him for charity.‘Why’ (quoth the merchant),‘What meaneth this thing?Do ye beg by the way,And have a house for a king?’‘Alas! sir’ (quoth the poor man),‘We are all turned out,And lie and die in cornersHere and there about.’”

It has frequently been asserted that although grave injury was undoubtedly done to the poor of the land by this wholesale confiscation, it was done unwittingly by the authorities, or that, at the worst, the portions of revenue derived from the property which had been intended for the support of the sick, aged, &c., was so bound up with those to which religious obligations (now declared superstitious and illegal) were attached, that it was impossible to distinguish the latter from the former, and all perished together, or rather passed undistinguished into the royal pocket. Such a view is not borne out by facts, and however satisfactory it might be to believe that this robbery of the poor and sick by the Crown was accidental and unpremeditated, the historian is bound by the evidence to hold that the pillage was fully premeditated and deliberately and consciously carried out. It is of course obvious, that some may regard it as proper that funds given for the support of priests to say masses or offer prayers for the souls of the departed should have been confiscated, although it would have been better had the money been devoted to some purpose of local utility rather than that it should have been added to the Crown revenues or have gone to enrich some royal favourite. For example it may, for the sake of argument, be admitted that the two fields at Petersfield in Hampshire thus taken by the royal commissioners – one called White field, in the tenure of Gregory Hill, the rent of which was intended to keep a perpetual light burning in the parish church, and the other held by John Mill, given to support a priest “called the Morrow Masse priest” (i. e. the priest employed to say the early morning mass for the convenience of people going to work) – were under the circumstances fair articles of plunder for the royal officials, when the mass was prohibited and the doctrine symbolised by the perpetual light declared superstitious. But this will not apply to the money intended for the poor. It might have been easy to justify the Crown’s action in taking the priest’s portion, and even the little pittance intended for the serving clerk, but the seizure of the benefactions to the poor cannot be defended. It was not accidental; for an examination of the original documents relating to the guilds and chantries now in the Record Office will show not only that the Royal Commissioners were as a rule careful to distinguish between the portions intended for religious purposes and those set aside for perpetual charity to the sick and poor, but in many cases they actually proposed to the Court of Augmentation to protect the latter and preserve them for the objects of Christian charity intended by the original donors. In every such case the document reveals the fact that this suggestion in the interest of common justice was rejected by the ultimate Crown officials, and a plain intimation is afforded on the face of the documents that even those sums intended by the original donors for the relief of poverty were to be confiscated.

The destruction of the guilds is, from any point of view, a sad and humiliating story, and, perhaps fortunately, history has so far permitted the thick veil of obscurity drawn over the subject at the time to remain practically undisturbed. A consideration of the scope and purposes of English mediæval guilds cannot but raise our opinion of the wisdom of our forefathers who fostered their growth, and convince us that many and useful ends were served by these voluntary societies. This opinion we can hold, wholly apart from any views we may entertain about the religious aspects of these societies generally. Socialistic they were, but their socialism, so far from being adverse to religion, as the socialism of to-day is generally considered to be, was transfused and directed by a deeply religious spirit, carried out into the duties of life, and manifesting itself in practical charities of every kind.

One or two points suggested by consideration of the working of mediæval guilds may be emphasized. The system of these voluntary societies would be, of course, altogether impossible and out of place in this modern world of ours. They would not, and could not, meet the wants and needs of these days; and yet their working is quite worth studying by those who are interested in the social problems which nowadays are thrusting themselves upon the public notice and demanding a solution. The general lessons taught by these voluntary associations may be summed up under one or two heads suggested by Mr. Ashley’s volume already referred to: (1) It is obvious that, unlike what we find to-day in the commercial enterprises of the world, capital played but a very small part in the handicrafts of those times; skill, perseverance, and connection were more important. (2) The middle ages had no knowledge of any class of what may be called permanent wage-labourers. There was no working-class in our modern sense: if by that is meant a class the greater portion of which never rises. In the fourteenth century, a few years of steady work as a journeyman meant, in most cases, that a workman was able to set up as a master craftsman. Every hardworking apprentice expected as a matter of course to be able to become in time a master. The collisions between capital and labour to which we are so much accustomed had no place in the middle ages. (3) There was no such gulf between master and man as exists in our days. The master and his journeyman worked together side by side, in the same shop, at the same work, and the man could earn fully half as much as his master. (4) If we desire to institute a comparison between the status of the working-classes in the fourteenth century and to-day, the comparison must be between the workman we know and the old master craftsman. The shop-keeping class and the middle-man were only just beginning to exist. The consumer and producer stood in close relation, and public control was exercised fully, as the craft guilds were subject to the supervision and direction of the municipal or central authority of the cities in which they existed.

CHAPTER XII

MEDIÆVAL WILLS, CHANTRIES, AND OBITS

The value of side-lights in an historical picture is frequently overlooked, or not duly appreciated. The main facts of a story may be presented with accuracy and detail, and yet the result may be as unlike the reality as the fleshless skeleton is to the living man. More especially are these side-lights requisite when the object of the inquirer is to ascertain the tone and temper of minds at some given time, and to discover what men, under given circumstances, were doing and thinking about. In trying, therefore, to gauge the mental attitude of Englishmen towards the ecclesiastical system existing on the eve of the Reformation, it is important not to neglect any faint glimmer of light which may be reflected from the records of the past, the brightness of which in its setting has been obscured only too well by the dark storm-clouds of controversy and prejudice.

Not the least valuable among what may be described as the minor sources of information about the real feeling of the people generally towards their religion on the eve of the Reformation are the wills, of which we have abundant examples in the period in question. It may, of course, appear to some that their spirit was in great measure dictated by what they now hold to be the erroneous opinions then in vogue as to Purgatory and the efficacy of prayer for the dead. That these doctrines of the Church had a firm hold on the minds and hearts of the people at large is certain. The evidence that this was so is simply overwhelming, and it may be taken to prove, not merely the existence of the teaching, but the cordial and unhesitating way in which it was accepted as a necessary part of the Christian faith. But this, after all, is merely a minor point of interest in the wills of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. What clearly appears in these documents, however, is the Catholic tone which pervades them, and enables the reader to realise perhaps more than he is able to do from any other class of document, the strong hold their religion must have had on the love and intelligence of the people of those days. The intelligences may not, indeed, have been of any very high order, but the souls were certainly penetrated by true Christian ideals. To those who penned those early wills, Faith was clearly no mere intellectual apprehension of speculative truth. Religion, and religious observance, was to them a practical reality which entered into their daily lives. The kindly Spirit that led them, brought them strength to bear their own and others’ burdens, in sickness and health, in adversity and prosperity, from childhood till their eyes closed in their last sleep. If we may judge from these last aspirations of the Christian soul as displayed in mediæval wills, we must allow that religion was very real indeed to our English forefathers in the sixteenth century, and that in reality the whole social order was founded upon a true appreciation of the Christian brotherhood in man, and upon the doctrine of the efficacy of good works for salvation. These truths of the social order were not indeed taught perhaps scientifically, and we might look in vain for any technical expression of them in the books of religious instruction most used during this period, but they formed none the less part of the traditional Christian teaching of the Middle Ages founded on the great principles of the Bible which then dominated popular thought.349

Those who would understand what this Christian spirit meant and the many ways in which it manifested itself, need only compare the wills of the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries with those, say, of the later years of Queen Elizabeth, when the religious revolution had been accomplished, and note the obvious difference in tone and purpose. The comparison need not be searching or entail much study; the change is patent and striking, and lies on the very surface.

Some examples of notes taken from pre-Reformation wills may be here given from the collection of Northern wills published by the Surtees Society under the title Testamenta Eboracensia, the fourth volume of which contains many wills made during the period in question. It may be useful to remark that one and all of these documents manifest the same spirit of practical Christianity, though of course in various degrees. Most of them contain bequests to churches with which the donors were chiefly connected; money is frequently left to the fabric, or to some special altar, or for the purchase of vestments, or to furnish some light to burn before the Blessed Sacrament, the rood or some image, to which the deceased had a particular devotion. Specific gifts of silks, rich articles of clothing and embroidered hangings fitted to adorn the Church of God, to make chasubles and copes, or altar curtains and frontals, are common. Practical sympathy with the poor is manifested by provision for distributions of doles at funerals and at anniversaries, and by gifts of cloaks and other articles of clothing, to those of the parish who were engaged in carrying torches at the burial, or had promised to offer up prayers for the soul of the testator. Besides these general features of interest, the wills in question show us that building operations of great magnitude were being carried on at this time in the parish churches of the North, and they thus furnish an additional proof of the very remarkable interest thus taken by the people at large in the rebuilding and adornment of the parish churches of England right up to the very overthrow of the old ecclesiastical system. These particular wills also bear a singular testimony to the kindly feelings which existed at this time between the general body of the clergy and the regular orders. Nearly every will of any cleric of note contains bequests of money to monks, nuns, and friars, whilst, in particular, those of the canons and officials of the great metropolitan church of York bear testimony to the affection and esteem in which they held the Abbot and monks of St. Mary’s Abbey in the same city, which from its close proximity to the minster might in these days have been regarded as its rival.