The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds Christians that they are surrounded by a great “cloud of witnesses.” (NRSV) That “cloud” has continued to grow in size since then. In this monthly column we will be thinking about some of the people and events, over the past 2000 years, that have helped make up this “cloud.” People and events that have helped build the community of the Christian church as it exists today.
The Protestant leaders of the 16th-century Reformation sharply criticized the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy for what they viewed as theological errors, institutional abuse and corruption. They rejected the authority of the pope as unbiblical, arguing instead for sola scriptura (Scripture alone) as the highest authority in Christian faith and practice, and condemned practices such as the sale of indulgences, veneration of relics, intercession of saints, and other beliefs and practices which they saw as deviating from the New Testament witness.
The reformers also opposed the sacramental system – which had developed in medieval Catholicism – denying that salvation was mediated through Church rituals and clergy, and instead proclaimed sola fide (justification by faith alone). They also accused the Church hierarchy of moral decadence, financial exploitation, and political entanglement; and asserted that the papacy had departed from apostolic Christianity. In some statements they even identified it with the Antichrist. Overall, this critique (though varying in content and emphasis) combined doctrinal, moral, and institutional objections, and aimed to restore the purity and authority of the early Christian community.
All of this can leave one thinking that the late-medieval Church in the West was moribund and just treading water, waiting for the Reformation to happen. The reality was rather more complex. Let us take England as our case study, as it has a good medieval documentary base.
Building for God’s glory
So great was the extent of church construction in the 13th century that it has been calculated it was the equivalent, in modern terms, of every family in England paying over £1,000 every year into these projects, for the whole century! There was community-wide engagement with the development of churches in the latest architectural style. It is too easy to dismiss this as just the worldly competition of communities and elites attempting to gain divine favour. These buildings were seen as expressions of faith and as a means to glorify God.
From about 1250 many church buildings became more complex, developing from the simple components of nave and chancel. By 1300, many added bell towers, side aisles, porches and spires. This accelerated between 1300 and 1500. After about 1330, the more sweeping, vertical lines of the Perpendicular Style of church architecture may have struck a particular chord with a society which, after the Black Death, saw its spirituality more in terms of a personal faith surviving the destruction of earthly confidence and ambition.
The rebuilding of churches in the 15th century was particularly associated with rich wool producing areas such as the Cotswolds, Somerset, Suffolk and northern Essex. Here, churches such as Huish Episcopi (Somerset), Northleach (Gloucestershire) and Lavenham (Suffolk) are classic examples of this great rebuilding. Other features of church furniture and decoration also increased in this period: font covers, rood screens, brass lecterns, images of Jesus and Mary and of saints, stone funeral monuments. It was only during this period that seating, in the form of benches and pews, became common.
From the later 14th century, and throughout the 15th, there was an increase in the building of chantry chapels, where Masses were said for the dead. This dovetailed into the doctrine of purgatory – which had come to prominence in Church teaching since the 12th century. In the years after the cataclysmic events of the Black Death a huge investment took place in building chantry chapels and in leaving money for chantry priests to celebrate Mass on behalf of the dead benefactors. Bristol, by the late 15th century, had 18 parish churches, 120 temporary chantries and 20 permanent chantries. While the concept of purgatory, and prayers for the dead, would be rejected by later Protestant reformers, the chantries revealed an attempt, in many communities, to come to terms with death and the hereafter.
Alongside this, was an increased emphasis on the recognition of the transience of human life and preparation for death. The fashion grew for reflecting human mortality in tomb carvings showing the emaciated corpse, or skeleton, of the dead person. Sometimes carvings included the lifelike appearance of the person and beneath it a stone representation of the decaying corpse.
Engagement with faith, in the face of death
It is surely no coincidence that one of the first books printed by Caxton in the 1490s was one entitled “Arte and crafte to knowe well to die”. And, throughout the late Middle Ages, the dead and the living were regarded as being part of a related community. Cemeteries were used for processions and parts of Easter services; sermons were preached and fairs held in these same areas; the dead were often publicly displayed before burial; graveside memorials and rituals kept fresh their memory.
While burial in rows in some large cemeteries reduced disturbance of earlier graves, there is plenty of evidence from archaeology and written sources to show this often could not be avoided and the physical presence of the dead was a daily reality. In the play Hamlet, written by William Shakespeare c.1599–1601, the skull of Yorick (the former court jester of Denmark) is uncovered by gravediggers (Act 5, Scene 1), causing Hamlet to deliver the famous lines beginning, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio,” and he then uses the moment to meditate on death, mortality, and the inevitability of decay. Late medieval Christians were familiar with this reality too and in trying to respond to it in a way which expressed their Christian faith.
In addition, during the second half of the 14th century, burials in coffins became more common. This may have been caused by distress at decaying corpses resulting from the Black Death’s impact on both the manner of death and the numbers of the dead. In which case coffins may have been felt to contain this contaminating corruption (both in a physical and a spiritual sense) and to have preserved bodily integrity as the dead awaited the Final Judgement. This seems to have been particularly the case with women, since medieval concepts of sexuality held that women would decay more swiftly than men.
Preaching, learning, caring, reflecting
By 1250 the main surge of monastic building was over and most support from this date went to the friars, who settled (and preached) in centres of population and – being forbidden to own property – lived by relying on the gifts of local townspeople. This engaged with an appetite for preaching as opposed to a passive experience in church.
However, as more money flowed to the friars they lost their radical edge. As a result, gifts of money steadily moved away from the friars and increased to local parish churches, where people felt they could monitor its use more closely. Similarly, instead of monasteries or friaries, wealthy benefactors were now more likely to fund a college which, as well as saying Masses for the souls of their patrons, often included an educational function, or provided homes for the ‘deserving poor.’ These ranged from magnificent establishments such as Oxford and Cambridge colleges to small colleges and almshouses in less prestigious market towns.
This was not an abandonment of medieval spiritual enthusiasm but rather a desire to see it carried out more effectively. What might be presented as an end to old patterns of behaviour can equally be regarded as a re-focusing of them. At the same time, the number of hermits, often located in town churches rather than in deserted spots, increased. These anchorites/ anchoresses – while living in relative isolation – were still available for giving spiritual advice and provided an accessible personal ‘holy presence’ in the middle of busy urban communities. A famous anchoress was Julian of Norwich (died c.1416). Her writings, now known as “Revelations of Divine Love”, express a deeply personal visionary experience of – and relationship with – the Lord Jesus and the transformation made possible by the love of God. It is the earliest surviving English-language work attributed to a woman; and the only surviving English-language work by an anchoress.
The challenge of the Lollards
The term ‘Lollard’ covers a wide range of critics of the way the Church was run in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Those who are often described under this umbrella-term held mixed beliefs that were not part of a unified system. Some hoped to reform the Church. Some thought the institution of the Church was irrelevant to a person’s salvation. Some condemned all religious images. Some called for new and purer images to be produced to help people come closer to God. Most rejected formal attempts at holiness such as institutional fasting. But one thing all had in common was their attack on the worldly power and wealth of the Church. The most radical Lollards asserted the ‘priesthood of all believers.’ A central figure in this challenge to the Church was John Wycliffe, associated with translating the Bible into English (not in itself a novelty).
The fact that similar dissatisfaction with the Church fed into both Wycliffe’s circle of Oxford intellectuals and the radical ‘hedge-priests’ noted during the Peasants’ Revolt (1381) was not the result of conspiracy, or a common organisation – but it could easily appear so or be made to appear so. After the Oldcastle Revolt of 1414, Lollards and insurrectionary threats were firmly linked – at least in the minds of the elite – and gentry support melted away as the death penalty began to be applied to lower-class Lollards who persisted in their beliefs.
They are sometimes regarded as proto-Protestants. In reality, they reveal how complex faith was in the late-medieval English church, with some critics challenging the Church ‘root and branch,’ while others sought a way to a living faith within traditional structures and practices.
Spiritual crisis or personal engagement with faith?
There is ongoing debate as to the state of the Catholic Church in England in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Critics at the time and since were quick to point out its shortcomings and some historians have suggested that these were part of developments which would inevitably culminate in the Reformation. In other words, it was widespread dissatisfaction with fundamental problems that eventually led to massive restructuring of the medieval Church in the 1530s. But things were more complex.
By 1500, the number of clerics, monks and nuns had declined from its height back in 1250; and the wealth of the religious houses were out of all proportion to their declining numbers. Nevertheless, by 1500, monasticism faced a slow decline, but not a sudden collapse.
More significantly, there is plenty of evidence which indicates that religious devotion was vibrant at the end of the Middle Ages. Many ‘Books of Hours’ were written so that literate laity could pray as part of their personal devotions during the Mass and when alone. Similarly, a devotion to the Eucharist helps explain the large number of pilgrims coming to visit the relic of the ‘Holy Blood’ at Hailes Abbey (Gloucestershire) and the relic of the ‘True Cross’ at Bromholm Priory (Norfolk). Protestant Reformers rejected this cult of relics as unscriptural – but that there was a hunger for personal spiritual connection with Christianity is undeniable.
Similar large numbers visited the shrine of Our Lady of Doncaster as late as the 1520s. Likewise, the shrine at Walsingham continued to draw pilgrims. Overall, while pilgrimage as an activity declined in the early 16th century, it was still significant. In fact, many local shrines grew in popularity as more famous national ones faced declining visitor numbers.
Late-medieval devotion to the Eucharist meant that popular Corpus Christi plays survived Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and were not banned until the state-run Reformation of Edward VI (1547–53). It is significant that it was the banner of the ‘Five Wounds of Christ’ which became the rallying flag of the Pilgrimage of Grace against Henry VIII’s Church policies, in 1536–37. Other expressions of this devotion to the sacrifice of Jesus can be found in the popularity of the image of Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus, known as ‘Our Lady of Pity.’
At the same time, artistic representations of the crucified Christ became increasingly realistic during the late-14th and the 15th centuries. Artistic images of ‘Christ suffering on the cross’ increasingly replaced earlier ones of ‘Christ reigning from the cross.’ A personal connection of believers with Christ – who identified with the frailty and pain of humanity – underpinned this development. As with much late-medieval faith, things were complex and there clearly was a hunger for a relationship with Christ, even if sometimes expressed in ways that would be rejected by later Reformers.
The English Church on the verge of the Reformation
The medieval English Church faced great challenges in 1500, but none need have been fatal to the continued development of a medieval spirituality which had continued unbroken since the late 6th century – if the Church hierarchy had engaged constructively with calls for reform and if Tudor politics had not intervened.
That this was not to be the case was the result of developments which could not have been foreseen as the 16th century opened. These were largely due to the turmoil emanating from Germany, as the papacy set its face against reforming the Church; coupled with Tudor nationalisation of the Church and a top-down Reformation, which was driven by a combination of Tudor politics alongside dissatisfaction (led by a committed minority) with medieval Catholicism. And it should be remembered that there were Protestant martyrs executed by Henry VIII, as well as Catholic ones who resisted his nationalisation of the English Church.
The evidence suggests that the English Church, in the later Middle Ages, was not just treading water and waiting for the Reformation to occur. It was always more complicated than that.
Martyn Whittock is an historian and a Licensed Lay Minister in the Church of England. The author, or co-author, of fifty-eight books, his work covers a wide range of historical and theological themes. In addition, as a commentator and columnist, he has written for several print and online news platforms and been interviewed on TV and radio news and discussion programmes exploring the interaction of faith and politics. His books A Brief History of Life in the Middle Ages (2013) and the co-written The Story of the Cross (2021), include exploration of the complex nature of late-medieval Christian faith and practice.
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