The Wiles Lectures, founded by the late Janet Boyd in memory of her father and hosted by Queen's University, Belfast, are a splendid institution. Four public lectures, delivered on successive days, are each evening (after dinner) subjected to analysis by a group of invited academic colleagues. This reviewer can testify to the convivial nature of the proceedings. Christopher Haigh gave the lectures in 2005 and the present book is the upshot. Having, as he explains, accumulated a mass of archival evidence over some twenty years relating to English parish religion in the post-Reformation period, Haigh had the idea of organizing this around the four religious characters in Arthur Dent's best-selling book The plain man's pathway to heaven (1601). The four characters, who also provided the themes of the four lectures, are the godly divine Theologus and three laymen: the ignorant Asunetus, the honest Philagathus, and the profane Antilegon. For the purposes of publication and to round out Dent, Haigh has added a fifth character – the ‘papist’, particularly as portrayed in the writings of Dent's fellow Elizabethan cleric George Gifford. Whereas in the past his stamping ground has tended to be the north of England, especially Lancashire, Haigh here draws ‘on more than 700 court books from fifteen different courts, from Somerset across to Essex and from Hampshire north to Lincolnshire’. Twelve counties located in ‘southern and central England’ are in fact involved, and it would be difficult to disagree with him that ‘the thousands and thousands of examples’ uncovered ‘add up to something more than local idiosyncrasies’. Moreover one cannot but admire the seemingly boundless energy of the author, although even he admits that ‘the long early morning drives’ to Essex on Saturdays proved ‘tedious’, while characteristically adding ‘but they were worth it’. Haigh has certainly tapped a rich vein of material concerning parish practices and beliefs, all analysed in an engagingly urbane style, even if the cases of witchcraft and unorthodoxy are not as startling as some of the Italian examples unearthed by Carlo Ginzburg. Nevertheless we are presented with a great deal of interesting material on adultery, atheism, baptism, bell-ringing, catechizing, churching, communion, excommunication, jokes and laughter, penance, sabbatarianism, sermon gadding, and sexual immorality – merely to list the longer index entries. Among the conclusions to emerge is that religion mattered to most people in early modern England, although in varied ways and hence the use of the plural ‘pathways’ in contrast to Dent. Haigh is also concerned to stress that for much of the time parishioners, despite their religious differences, lived together in relative harmony. From this also follows his contention that the English Civil War was not the product of escalating religious divisions.
In many ways this is a valuable book built on a wealth of scholarship, yet at the same time it suffers from a flawed methodology. First and foremost Dent and Gifford were both puritans – that is to say advocates of further reformation, who got into trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities for nonconformity. A consequence of adopting their religious categories is to run the risk of viewing the Church of England primarily through a puritan lens. Indeed Haigh quite explicitly defines English protestantism in terms of evangelical Calvinism, while Dent and Gifford provide, at best, almost unrecognizable caricatures of the kind of churchmanship famously associated with Richard Hooker. Previously Haigh himself has written of ‘parish anglicans’, albeit defined rather pejoratively as ‘spiritual leftovers’ or residual Catholics with no place to go save the local parish church and its prayer book services, but on this occasion and for reasons unexplained these ‘anglicans’ make no appearance as such. Nor is any use made of churchwardens' accounts, allegedly because they only shed light on the activities of parish elites; this has not, however, prevented Haigh in the past citing such sources as evidence of the unpopularity of the Reformation. Furthermore, in the present book, he has consciously eschewed any in-depth case studies, preferring instead a ‘broad-brush approach’ and the multiplication of examples, although an unfortunate downside of this is a tendency to fragmentation and loss of context, individuals flitting briefly across the parochial stage – as it were from dark to dark – and often with no indication even of social status. (Also, in this respect, virtually no use appears to have been made of surviving wills.) As a proud ‘Eltonian’, Haigh claims to have followed the prescription ‘work through the archive, and then see what it means’. On the other hand, a more problem-orientated approach from the outset might have yielded better results.
It is easy, of course, to criticize. So how else could Haigh have gone to work? On his own admission, church court records are a skewed source (‘misleadingly negative’), and by definition do not cover a whole range of issues pertinent to the recovery of popular religious beliefs; therefore they need very considerable supplementing, not least by churchwardens' accounts and wills. But above all much more investigation was required of the ‘ungodly’ majority, who rejected the Calvinist evangel. In this context Haigh's model, derived from Dent, of godly ‘zealots’ versus the ‘lazy’, the ‘indifferent’, and the ‘sceptics’ leaves a great deal to be desired. Similarly problematic is the concept of ‘proper protestants’.
