Christopher Haigh is a leading historian of the religious changes of sixteenth-century England, famously introducing the idea that reformation was a plural rather than a singular event. His book The English Reformations made the point well, but it ended with the suggestion that, in fact, little had changed despite much Reformation. His last sentence said it all: “Some Reformation.”
The present book takes up the issue of post-Reformation religious change on the parish level. To display the evidence of popular religious values, he chooses the frame of Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, whose dialogues display various religious positions, allowing its hero, Theologus, to correct their errors. Haigh has to add a chapter on papists, not found in Dent, so he borrows from another popular work of the day, taking his model from George Gifford’s A Dialogue beweene a Papist and a Protestant. Between them, Dent and Gifford become guides to perceptions of religious identity in English parishes in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Dent’s hero, Theologus, is a preacher, and Haigh finds ample material to demonstrate the frustrations faced by a godly preacher attempting to teach the “comfortable doctrine” of predestination. Among his parishioners is Antilegon, who does not believe such doctrine is comfortable at all, as it instead drives men to despair. Moreover, Antilegon, representative of many parishioners in the church courts, objects to the squabbling going on in the churches and scoffs at the claims of everyone who insists on only one right way. Antilegon has a neighbor, Asunetus, who just does not see the point of all this discipline. In his view, if a man says his prayers, knows his creed, and does no harm, it is enough for God. Asunetus is lax in discipline, but expects to be forgiven.
Their godly neighbor, Philagathus, is a different sort of problem. A supporter of Theologus, he has a “more godly than thou attitude,” seeing himself as a true follower of Christ. This could lead him into non-conformity, since he gads to sermons and criticizes his minister, insisting on receiving communion while seated, and breaking the rules in other pious ways. The papist is their neighbor, too. His conscience is not served by attending church. The clergy and wardens tries blandishments and punishments to gain their conformity. They have poor success.
Having borrowed the characters, Haigh dives into the church courts of southern England, listening for their voices. He finds a great deal of evidence, incarnating Dent’s characters as real people in the parishes. The research has taken him to record offices all over southern England to exam church court records, and he retails the evidence by the yard, quoting extensively. By the end of a chapter, however, one longs for a tight summation, which is not forthcoming. Nor does one get a summary of the state of English religion in the late Elizabethan age, even though it can be implied safely, given the evidence he provides, and it does seem to have been as fractured as Dent suggested.
Haigh’s evidence is nevertheless rich and suggestive, though there are times when one wishes for a little more context. For instance, Haigh does not attend to the local pressures that brought people to church courts. Tenants of Catholic or Puritan landlords may have had less than purely individual religious positions, and the churchwardens may not have been disinterested — a problem he admits. Lazy ministers, zealous church wardens, interfering magnates, and other irritants undoubtedly inspired and angered parishioners.
Haigh’s work nevertheless underscores the amount of religious change there was, showing how multivalent English religion became. Among the conforming there were all sorts of values and opinions that jostled together in the parishes. It would have been nice if he had taken a single parish and looked at all, of Dent’s people together of a Sunday. Standing or kneeling, a group of complex individuals heard the bidding prayer. Most did not live up to the ideals of their particular version of Theologus, but they were the living, breathing incarnation of English religion.
