V.Indulgences:A Case Study in Change
One previously neglected element of the local and the everyday in late medieval English religion and spirituality is the role of indulgences.[69]For Christopher Haigh,the silence about them at the Reformation leads to a straightforward conclusion:they‘did not play a big part in English religion’.[70]They are certainly not very visible in most discussions of the premedieval church,but this misrepresents their role.They are overlooked because they do not appear in the usual sources:they did not need to be recorded,so they were not recorded.However,the evidence,despite its many faults and problems,shows that indulgences were very common,and very popular.They have a poor reputation,from their place in the black economy,from the complaints of critics like Wycliffe,and from the satire on pardoners offered by writers like Chaucer and John Heywood;but these are incomplete and biased depictions.Indulgences were widely available,and widely distributed.They attracted pilgrims to sites across the country;to small parish churches and major shrines.In the former,the days on which they were offered may have been significant in the local liturgical round,a context for communal identity.Indulgences fed into charitable provision at local and national levels,such as the social provision of bridge-building and support for hospitals,and by providing mechanisms to aid individuals recovering from fire,flood,or other personal disasters.In the early 1500s,nation-wide collections occurred annually for institutions like the London hospitals of St Anthony of Vienne,or St Mary of Bethlehem;for the guild of the Name of Jesus in St Paul's cathedral,or of Our Lady at Boston in Lincolnshire;while the Trinitarian houses,the Order of St John of Jerusalem,and the Order of St Lazarus were equally active.Perhaps most widely available(yet least likely to be noted in official records)were the indulgences tied to devotional acts like saying the rosary or specific prayers,sometimes before specific images such as the Mass of St Gregory or Christ as Man of Sorrows.If anything,such indulgences were becoming more popular in the first decades of Henry VIII's reign,appearing in books of hours printed on the continent for the English market.[71]Found everywhere,but now often almost invisible,indulgences were a vital,and widely appreciated,component of English religion right through to the point of the break with Rome.
Arguably,the main reason why indulgences disappeared was because Purgatory was overthrown.Their existence and value for the souls of the dead depended on the existence of Purgatory as a place for satisfaction for sin after death:as a theologically secondary element in catholicism indulgences did not need to be debated.Yet their final days show the difficulties of reconciling the local and the everyday with a master narrative of Reformation.Edward Hall,Henry VIII's contemporary biographer,had no doubts about the speed of their ending:at the passing of the Act of Supremacy in 1534,‘the Pope with all his College of Cardinals with all their Pardons and Indulgences was utterly abolished out of this realm’.[72]He was probably right that no further grants of indulgences by popes or cardinals were officially accepted in England(although some may have been smuggled in).However,he was wrong if the Act is taken to indicate a total ban on indulgences.That was delayed for over a year.[73]In fact,the last known grant of an episcopal pardon in England dates from late 1536,in Exeter diocese:[74]clearly some people still thought them both theologically and practically worthwhile.Several bodies which had earlier offered indulgences in exchange for donations continued to collect funds.They sent out representatives with royal letters of protection(as they had done earlier),but no longer proclaimed their papal privileges.What these replacement pardoners said on their rounds and how people responded to them and understood their message is unknown.
Pre-Reformation national collections generally leave traces in the official records,but evidence for the collections which took place after 1536 is rare.Indications of,and comments on,local and personal responses to the decline of indulgences are even rarer.It is impossible to say how swiftly,or how fully,pardons were wiped from English devotional mentalities,at least while liturgical and devotional practice remained essentially catholic.In some surviving devotional woodcuts,and in books of hours,indulgences were struck through to invalidate them;attacks which significantly did not affect the prayers to which the indulgences were attached,or the devotional stimulus of the image.In prayer books,the deletion often seems halfhearted,leaving the indulgence fully legible,and so available,to potential users.[75]Even more problematic is the possibility of continuing everyday practice which would allow indulgences to carry on despite official pronouncements.This applies particularly to the continuation of devotions which involved the use of rosaries and prayer-beads(such as the series of prayers recited in‘Our Lady's Psalter’),and the continued possession of sets of beads dating from before the dissolution of the religious houses which had been charged with the power to transmit indulgences.On such matters the silence in the sources is almost complete;yet it is worth noting that one cause of revolt in Cornwall in 1549 was an attempt to bully a woman into abandoning use of the rosary.[76]
The more firmly parochial response to the decline of indulgences is also rarely noted.Yet there is intriguing evidence in two sets of churchwardens' accounts from East Anglia.At Mildenhall,in Norfolk,the parish indulgence is regularly mentioned in the early sixteenth-century accounts;it had existed since before 1449.Under Henry VIII,the indulgence brought in useful(but not large)sums on the five days when it was annually offered.Explicit references to it decline in the early 1530s,so that a payment recorded in 1539 is something of a surprise:‘Item,to the mason for laying the pavement[the stone floor in the church]and erasing the bishop of Rome's pardon on the wall,2s.6d.’.[77]Despite the passage of time and the campaign against papal authority in England,up to this point Mildenhall still had an indulgence advertised on its walls,one which was known as(and may have been declared to be)papal in origin.
The erasure of 1539 does not end the story.For a few more years,until the mid-1540s,Mildenhall's churchwardens'accounts still noted specific sums deliberately collected on what had previously been the indulgence days.[78]The indulgence may have been wiped off the wall,but had it been wiped from memory,or from the mentality?
A similar,but different,tale can be reconstructed from the churchwardens'accounts of Swaffham,Suffolk.[79]There the parish indulgence is also regularly recorded in the accounts,with collections being noted on five Sundays through the year.The listing of receipts is fuller than for Mildenhall,especially(and importantly)in the mid-1530s.The regular series continues,with the last collection being recorded in Lent 1536.This last reference might be taken to reflect obedience to the instructions of central government,with a proclamation of December 1535 or January 1536 usually being taken to signal the final abolition of indulgences.[80]However,while the entry of Lent 1536 was the last mention of the indulgence,it was not the last mention of the collections.The pardon days were silently transformed into days on which collections were held for offerings made out of‘devotion’.The first receipts under the new heading appear on the date which would normally have been the next in the annual pardon cycle,the third Sunday after Easter.[81]The accounts show signs of incomplete recording,which may be incomplete collecting;it was only in the 1540s that this replacement regime collapsed completely,with the last regular collection being entered in June,1543.Here local financial practices clearly continued across what was meant to be a doctrinal watershed;but it is impossible to say how much of a mental break is reflected in the changed wording of the accounts,and whether a culture of indulgences(and,perhaps,Purgatory)continued within the parish.
These two parish cases raise the issues of mental change,and the balance between old and new.Responses to change across England were affected by awareness of change,and by the awareness of the implications of the doctrines which were being offered in place of old catholicism.Polarisations of‘reform’and‘catholicism’unavoidably emphasise the doctrinal differences between the old and new religions;but the differences may often have been blurred,to make the new more acceptable to adherents of the old.There is some evidence for a deliberately modified Lutheranism in England in the last years of Henry VIII;[82]it can perhaps be demonstrated with regard to indulgences and the understanding of their place in the scheme of salvation.Indulgences certainly came under attack;but the reformers’ own message offered a form of indulgence by making salvation dependent on faith in a Christ whose passion offered remission of sins for those who believed in him and accepted his promises.Justification on those terms was firmly part of catholic tradition—it is cited,for instance,in a memorial sermon for Lady Margaret Beaufort(grandmother to King Henry VIII)which was preached in 1509,but set firmly in a catholic combination of works and faith.[83]Defenders of catholicism in England in the 1530s claimed that Lutheranism in fact offered salvation with much less effort than catholicism demanded,making it appear too easy—and in fact making it the greatest of indulgences.[84]If that did happen,and if that was the message received in the parishes(even if not intended),it is no surprise that there could be confusion,or that old mentalities might continue under a supposedly new regime.