14. The Reformation in Kibworth

In the summer of 1535, with candles burning before the image of Our Lady of Kibworth, the light from the stained glass glinting on the painted rood above him, the vicar William Peyrson had to make an extraordinary series of church announcements to his parishioners. During the previous months Henry VIII’s Parliament had enacted a short piece of legislation which would have a significance to the English people out of all proportion to its length: an Act of Supremacy asserting that ‘the king our sovereign Lord his heirs and successors kings of this realm, shall be taken accepted and reputed the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England.’ With that the Pope, whose predecessor Gregory the Great had sent the famous mission to convert the English almost a thousand years before, was no longer the head of the Christian Church in England.

This was the crowning moment in a religious revolution which had gathered momentum over the previous five years. King Henry’s Reformation had begun earlier in the 1530s over his divorce from Katherine of Aragon and his love for Anne Boleyn, but had now become an issue for all in his realm. How it was to be interpreted on the ground at parish level in Kibworth was now Peyrson’s responsibility. That summer of 1535 the government abolished ‘the abuses of the Bishop of Rome. His authority and jurisdiction.’ The English clergy were ordered to teach the doctrine of Royal Supremacy to their parishioners and:

to cause all manner prayers orisons, rubrics, canons in mass books, and all other books used in the churches, wherin the said Bishop of Rome is named or his presumptuous and proud pomp and authority preferred, utterly to be abolished eradicated and erased out, and his name and memory to be nevermore (except to his contumely and reproach) remembered.

In the chancel behind the medieval oak screen, Peyrson now had to watch his curate apply a metal scraper to the ink in his old vellum mass book, scraping out the Pope’s name and titles. From now on there would be no mention of the holy father in Sunday prayers.

Up to that point Kibworth had been still a traditional society: a community where the rich local brand of late-medieval Christianity was still robustly thriving after many centuries. Inside the church there were the old familiar images, the glowing stained glass and brightly painted rood screen, the incense and the lamps; and there too were practised the old familiar rituals, the saint’s day processions and relic cults, the church alms and masses for the dead, the suspended moment in time when the Host was raised and the Body became present in the Mass. From Kibworth there were visits to Walsingham and to the ‘mother church’ in Lincoln (which no Kibworthian omitted to mention in his or her will); and to the network of local shrines: the holy well at Hallaton and the shrine of St Wistan with its little painted statue of the royal prince and martyr, whose golden hair, it was said, waved each year at the end of May in the long grass of the water meadows below Kibworth.

It is likely that so far, as elsewhere in England, the parishioners of Kibworth took these new developments in their stride. They had their lives to get on with; in an agricultural community life was bounded by work. Matters of supremacy were something for kings and ministers to worry about, not the man who cuts the hay or the woman who brews the ale. But the same year a heavy new tithe was imposed on all parishes and as the dissolution of the great monasteries began, through the summer of 1536, reformation of religious practices at local level gathered momentum. One new law abolished all holy days which fell in the law term and the harvest period, with a handful of exceptions; it was claimed they were damaging the country’s economy, stopping vital work and impoverishing workers. Services could be held, but people must work as usual. As might be imagined, there was widespread anger over this attack on traditional religion, with some daring to call King Henry and his henchmen a ‘false secte of heretiques’. In the north the response was a mass armed rising which came close to toppling Henry’s government, and news of these sensational events, along with disturbing omens and prophecies of further threats to the Commonwealth, no doubt reached Kibworth.

In September 1538 Peyrson again addressed his parishioners from the pulpit to inform them of a new and still more hardline series of injunctions. There was to be a new Great Bible (or ‘King’s Bible’) kept on a chain in each parish church; to be read out aloud in church services; the first authorized Bible in English. The vicar was now required to make a register of births, marriages and deaths for the parish in a vellum manuscript to be carefully kept in church, effectively gathering information on the conformity of the people. He was also to conduct regular examination of the laity in the principles of faith, to see that they were not slipping back into ‘childish superstition’. But most disconcerting to Peyrson and his flock was the ferocity of the government’s new language against traditional English piety. For in their pronouncements now was a sneering contempt for the old customs and practices of the faith which had sustained ordinary English men and women for so long: pilgrimage, devotion to images and worship of saints, the old rituals of confession and absolution, the masses for the dead. To a traditionalist like Peyrson this must have been a devastating blow. He was now instructed to exhort the people of the village ‘not to repose their trust in any other works devised by mens phantasies, as in pilgrimages, offering of money or candles or tapers to images and relics … or in kissing or licking them, or such like superstitions’. To avoid the ‘detestable sin of idolatry’ he should remove from his church all such ‘feigned images’, even the beloved Virgin of Kibworth herself. Though Peyrson could perhaps not see it yet, with that the process was set in train which would lead inexorably to the rubbing away of the traditional spirit world of the English.

Will Peyrson was a conventional clerk, son of a staunchly Catholic mother, a man who lived and died in the Old Faith. Devoted to the cult of Mary, as he put it, ‘to Our Blessed Ladye, Most Purest Virgyne, and to all the companye of heaven’, he was punctilious in observing the solemn rituals of the past, and among his possessions was a little stone crucifix plated with silver which he used for prayer in his own chamber. Not surprisingly he could not conceal his anger about these new developments. That September in Kibworth church an argument over the government’s reforms took place in front of the parishioners and led to Peyrson making an outburst against King Henry. This was reported to the authorities by some of them, led by a man identified in the offical report only as ‘R. O’. The core of R. O.’s information was that ‘Peyrson the priest in Kybworth church most devilishly spake these words: “If the King had died seven years agone it had been no hurt.” ’ Wishing the king dead of course could be construed in many ways and was not wise given Henry’s malevolent obsession with crushing any kind of dissent. Peyrson was hauled off to Leicester and thrown in prison by Henry’s local enforcers, one of whom, Sir John Beaumont, wrote to Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, concerning the case: ‘The wretch is in prison. His accusers are sworn before the sheriff.’

The tale would be repeated up and down the land over the next few years. Peyrson was an old-fashioned country vicar: his traditional regime of memorial masses, miracle plays, pilgrimages and church alms was not to the liking of the new order in the shires whose inquisitions will soon enough dismiss men like him as ‘unsound in religion … massemongers who useth incantation … and who dice and play games’. One Midland vicar was even said to be ‘a drunkard and dumbe, and it is thought a sorcerer’. Peyrson’s chief accuser, Sir John Beaumont, on the other hand, was typical of the unscrupulous ‘new rich’ partisans of Cromwell: he acquired the lands and buildings of Grace Dieu Priory for himself after claiming two nuns had been guilty of fornication and had given birth to children. He was eventually dismissed for corruption and misappropriation, though too late to save Peyrson’s career.

But who were the Kibworth informants who had been so angry with their vicar that they had informed on him, and did they genuinely hold more Protestant views? ‘R. O.’ perhaps was Robert Oswin, who lived at the end of Hog Lane by the village ditch (his plot is occupied by a modern house today, but the arable just north of it is still called Oswins Leys). Unless there was a personal animus against Peyrson, the tale suggests that Henry’s reformation of the old religion already had some supporters among old families of the village, and perhaps even (though this is harder to quantify) that some of the dissenting ideas spread by the Lollards might have been still current in the village. As in the early fifteenth century there may well have been splits in the village, and even in families, over religion. But these were increasingly uneasy times and when talk went astray there was no telling where ‘Scandalous, Seditious and Treasonable Speech’ might end.

The reign of Edward VI: ‘commocion tyme’

The writing was on the wall. Nevertheless Henry’s Six Articles of 1539 reaffirmed the centrality of the traditional mass and even threatened its critics with burning. So the English religious establishment for now continued as a compromise with a part-Protestant, part-Catholic prayer book. As far as we can tell from wills of the time, most of the people in Kibworth as in England generally were still satisfied with the old religion and were devoted and generous to their local church and clergy. The turning point came with Henry’s death in 1547. The new king, Edward, a pious and cold-hearted swot, was ardently Protestant, and with the evangelical party triumphant in Court, rumours spread across the country like wildfire through ‘markets fairs and ale-houses’ of ‘innovations and changes in religion’. Within months the commissioners moved into the regions with a draconian set of enquiries. A root-and-branch reform was to take place of the people’s ‘blindness and ignorance’, which was founded on ‘devising and phantasising vain opinions of purgatory and masses’.

Over the next five years Edward and his advisers imposed sweeping changes on the fabric, furnishings, customs and liturgy of the parish church. Images, stone altars and rood lofts were taken down and destroyed. Whitewash and biblical texts replaced the gorgeous medieval wall paintings. And with this physical desecration came the destruction of the valued local institutions – chantries, free chapels and guilds – which had provided teaching, dispensed charity and performed anniversary masses. In Kibworth the little free chapels of St Leonard in Smeeton, St Lawrence in Beauchamp and St Cuthbert in Harcourt were closed down and demolished, their rubble sold off for building stone.

So Edward’s reformation became a wholesale wrecking of the old church at parish level, and an attack on the traditional beliefs and rituals long followed by the English people, even striking at that most natural and intimate of human needs: the remembrance of the dead. And though Catholicism was briefly and bitterly restored under Mary in 1553, the Protestant religion was finally settled under Elizabeth after 1558 when the last phase of iconoclasm began – a third change of regime and religious policy in twelve years. No specific information survives on this from Kibworth, but it is very likely that it was in Edward’s day that the interior of St Wilfrid’s parish church, with its fourteenth-century rood lofts, screens, saints’ panels, wall paintings and altars, was effaced, leaving what is seen today. No doubt there were those who were glad to see these ‘marks of idolatry’ destroyed, but to others it was a time when ‘all godly ceremonies were taken out of the church … all goodness and godliness despised and in manner banished … when devout religion and honest behaviour of men was accounted and taken for superstition and hypocrisy.’ The argument between those two points of view would take centuries to resolve – and is not over yet.

Living through the Reformation

How did the Reformation work itself out in the village? How did our villagers cope? We can track the ups and downs of the vicars: Peyrson’s hatred of Henry VIII leading to his imprisonment and dismissal; the subsequent refusal of later Tudor vicars to accept enforced change from either the Protestant or the Catholic side; the enmity between High Church and Puritan rivals in the Civil War. But what of the people themselves? As we have seen, there may have been a long undercurrent of anti-clericalism and dissent in the village, going back to the turbulent years of the early fifteenth century when such questions even split families, such as the Polles, Browns and Gilberts, stalwarts of the community. The Oswins and others may have approved of Henry’s reforms in the 1530s.

What happened during these great changes between the late 1530s and the 1560s cannot be tracked in detail in Kibworth as the churchwardens’ accounts have not survived. The parish registers cannot help us either as they start only in 1574 and are missing at least eight or nine years: they may have begun at the start of Elizabeth’s reign. The enormous quantity of administrative material in the bishop’s registers in Lincoln has yet to be trawled. But what we can do in Kibworth is suggest some of the changes, both material and psychological, in a new source for the village story, the wills of the villagers. Twenty thousand of these survive for the shire from 1490 to 1600 in the County Record Office, and many more after. Often accompanied by inventories of possessions, these provide a vivid insight into the people’s lives. At earlier stages in the village story some kind of intimacy has been possible, for example in letters like that of John Pychard, but in the wills we can find hints of the villagers’ beliefs and concerns, their attitudes to work, houses and possessions, and even to luxuries; but especially to friends, family and neighbours.

The villagers’ wills begin within living memory of the Wars of the Roses, early in Henry VIII’s time, and many of the community then still belonged to the old families we have followed from the thirteenth century, such as the Carters, Browns, Sanders and Iliffes in Harcourt, and the Reynalds, Hyndes, Colmans, Gambles and Wards in Beauchamp. Drawn up in 1516, early in the reign of Henry VIII, is the will of a woman from another old family that we have found was well established in 1279: the Polles, who at this time lived in the bailiff’s house, now known as the Manor House, on Main Street. As we have seen, until the 1530s England was a Catholic country, and the will follows traditional formulas (‘Sir’ before Katherine’s son’s name is the traditional honorific for the village curate; a trental is thirty requiem masses to be recited by the vicar):

In the name of God Amen the eighth day of the month of April 1516 I Katherine Poll of Kibworth Harcourt sound of mind and memory make my Testament in this manner. Firstly I leave my soul to almighty God and the Blessed Mary, and my body to be buried in the churchyard of St Wilfrid’s in the parish of Kibworth. Item I leave to the Mother Church of Lincoln 4d. Item I leave for the repair of the parish church of Kibworth aforesaid 20s. Item I leave for the repair of the Chapel of St Leonard of Smeeton 3s 4d. Item I leave to Margaret my daughter 53s 4d. Item I leave to Sir William Polle my son to celebrate one trental for prayers for the health of my soul and all the faithful departed 10s. Item I leave to each of the priests who celebrate my exequies 6d. Whatever truly remains of my goods I leave my executors Sir William Polle and Thomas Clerke of Kibworth Beauchamp to despose of as they think fit for the good of my soul and to be supervisor of my testament Sir Walter Lucas Rector of the church of Kibworth.

The text is brief and to the point, as might befit an ordinary farmer’s wife, but it suggests the rich detail of local religious life: Katherine’s devotion to the Virgin Mary and to the mother church of Lincoln; the trental of thirty requiem masses to help her soul through purgatory; the evidence that her son ‘Sir’ William was a curate or chaplain in the village, and hence (though from a peasant family) literate and ‘book learned’. The gift for ‘each of the priests’ who were to perform her funeral procession and service suggests that Katherine had requested a full old-fashioned country funeral with the tolling of the ‘Great Bell’. Katherine’s bequest of money for the repair of the little chapel in Smeeton tells us of her devotion to one of the little free chapels which had sprung up in the later Middle Ages across the parish where village families paid for regular prayers to be recited for the souls of their ancestors. Such was the village world on the eve of the Reformation.

The next will comes from Katherine’s cousin, John Polle. John was the bailiff in Kibworth Harcourt from 1520 to 1536, so he and his wife Amice lived through the beginnings of the crisis with Henry VIII. Long a pillar of village society, he was counted as the richest farmer in the village in the 1524 Lay Subsidy, where he was assessed at £33 in goods, as against some of his middling neighbours who were rated at a mere £3 or £4, and ten more who were taxed on wages of only 20s per annum, including members of some old families like the Colmans. John could count back seven or eight generations to his forebear Nicholas in 1280. Again his last testament is a traditional Catholic one, with prayers to the Virgin Mary (the most popular cult in the village) and ‘all the company of Heaven’, and like Katherine he asks for a trental of thirty requiem masses to be recited for his soul in St Wilfrid’s church. Taken down in wonderfully idiomatic English, the text is presumably what John spoke when he made his will in August 1536, ‘by the visitation of almighty god’ confessing himself to the vicar of Kibworth, ‘my ghostly father’, who is none other than William Peyrson, whom we met above. The original will would have been taken down by the village scribe and is a fine example of the looseness of English spelling at this time (some breaks in the manuscript have been filled, spellings have been modernized, abbreviations expanded and light punctuation added):

In Dei Nomine Amen I John Polle of Kibworth … by the visitation of almighty God: make my will after this manner following, having my perfect mind, and bequeath my soul unto all mighty God Beseeching him to have mercy and our Blessed Lady to pray for me and all the company of heaven. And my body to be buried In the churchyard of the forsaid Kibworth and secondly my wife and my son William Polle I make my executors and John Brian to be my supervisor. Thirdly as concerning the dividing of my goods: In primis I bequeath unto Our Lady of Lincoln 6d. Item unto my parish church I bequeath 20d.

Item onto my ghostly father’s house a trental. Item It is my mind and will that my wife shall have her [due portion] With all thereto pertaining onto her haven Be hove And lyke manner my son William Poll to have his onto is behave. Item I give and bequeath onto my son Thomas Polle one messuage and two yardlands which I purchased of John Russell of Rothwell after the decease of me and my wife whichever us it pleases god to live the longer. Item unto the said Thomas I bequeath half a score of ewes and lambs. Item I bequeath onto every one of his children a ewe and a lamb. Item I give and bequeath onto my son Richard Polle two messuages with all appurtenances which I purchased of Richard Ray after the decease of me and my wife. Item I bequeath onto the said Richard Polle four heifers And five marks of money. Item bequeath unto my brother Thomas Poll a gown and a noble of money And to both of his children a ewe and a lamb. Item it is my mind and will that my sister shall have a cow and a howse herd after decease of her husband. Item I bequeath onto every one of my god children 4d

The will of a long-serving bailiff and an influential man in the village, this suggests the straightforward country Catholicism of a well-to-do farmer in the 1530s. His family had given service in the village through the Great Famine, the Black Death and many other major events in village history. His ample personal possessions are not mentioned as they went straight to his wife Amice, who was still living in the house.

From the same period but from the opposite end of the social scale, there is the will of Thomas Colman, John’s neighbour. Thomas was a smallholding husbandman whose descendant ‘Widow Coleman’ was a well-known village smallholder in the 1630s, and whose later descendants still live in the village of Kibworth Beauchamp today. Tom is typical of the small farmers and husbandmen in the Tudor village. In the 1524 hearth tax he is taxed in Kibworth Beauchamp but in his will he mentions kinsmen who live in Harcourt too. He is valued at the lowest band of 20s annual income, along with thirteen other smallholders – the lineal and sometimes biological descendants of the freemen and customary tenants of the thirteenth-century surveys. Tom’s will comes on the heels of Will Peyrson’s imprisonment and the installation of a new vicar, Robert Mason, but it is still thoroughly Catholic in its devotion to the Virgin Mary and the ‘holy company of heaven’, a traditional formulation by a Catholic village priest. Tom’s was a pious, old-fashioned English village Christianity, exemplified in his provisions for the untimely death of his son. His reference to ‘some poor priest’ is noteworthy: his slight reticence about giving money to a well-off priest perhaps a hint of old opinions in the village about the unmerited wealth of the clergy? But a bushel of wheat and 4d to every poor person in the parish is generous, as is the gift to his parish church. Robert Mason, the curate named by Tom, was later the vicar who became notorious for a sex scandal in the village in 1541. Finally, Tom’s will also offers a fascinating glimpse into the personal possessions of a small farmer. From them we may imagine his house (perhaps fifty or sixty feet long), with an open hall in the middle and a chamber with a bedroom floor at one end and a kitchen at the other. He would have had an outhouse, a workshop and a yard with hay barns, cattle stalls, a stable, a well and a privy. Tom’s descendant Wayne, by the way, is the caretaker of the Old Grammar School hall today:

In Dei Nomine Amen I Thomas Colman of Kibworth husbandman of good mind & perfect Memory makes this my testament & last will in manner & form following. First I bequeath my soul to God almighty, Our Lady Saint Mary & to all the holy company of heaven & my body to be buried within the churchyard of Kibworth. Item I give to the mother church of Lincoln 4d. Item I give to my parish church of Kibworth 6 shillings and 8d. Item I give to my sister Katherine Colman one stick of wheat, one stick of malt, my rose red coat & my violet coat. Item I will the said Katherine Colman to have three roods of barley land: three roods of peas land to be part ploughed & sown at my costs & charges for one year & I give to her also one rood of wheat readily sown & one young calf. Item I give to any poor man within the town of our Kibworth 4d. Item I give to whomever (poor) person one bushel of malt. Item if my son John Colman shall shortly depart then I give to some poor priest to sing for my soul & all Christian souls for a quarter of a year’s space 20 shillings. Item I give to my sister Alice Baly of Wigston one strike of wheat, one strike of malt & I give to her husband two jerkins & one pair of hose. Item I give to Sanders’ wife, Cooper’s wife, Alice Wood Peters’ wife, Alice Bukes 4d apiece. Item I give to William Coleman cowherd my second rose coloured coat, my best doublet & 4d of money. Item I give to Robert Frisley one Kersey doublet & 4d of money. Item I give to each one of my godchildren that be alive one ewe lamb. Item I give to James Eastwood my … 12d. Item I give to ‘Sir’ Robert Mason my curate & godfather 13d. The residue of my goods my debts paid & my Will performed I give to Alice Colman my wife & John Colman my son whom I make my executors to distribute them to the pleasure of God and to the health of my soul & all Christian souls, this to witness Sir Robert Massey parish priest of Kibworth Richard Moor of the same, John Park of the same William Colman of the same with others more & I will the said John Park to be the supervisor of this my last will

Anno Domino 1538

Appended to Thomas’s will is an inventory of his goods. From this can be seen the basic possessions of a small-holding farmer on the eve of the Reformation in Henry VIII’s day. A summary note of household goods lumped them together as ‘stuff in the house’. Then his ‘horses and carts: ploughs: and the gear for the plough teams & all things belonging to them’. The most valuable part of the estate as assessed by his neighbours was ‘the dairy herd young and old’ (worth 40s); his sheep flock (worth 40s) and ‘the crop within the house’, the stored grain, also worth 40s. All of which made him worth £11 6s 8d, about a third of John Polle’s estate.

Although Tom possessed some good clothes (his two ‘rose-red jackets’ sound more than farming gear – could they have been his Sunday best?), his and Alice’s household was clearly not one where luxury, fancy clothes and furniture were the norm. Tom’s was an ordinary Kibworth working family of the Tudor period: pious, anxious about prayers for his soul in the hereafter; concerned that the new vicar and curate do well by his eternal soul, and that his kinsmen and neighbours protect his estate. But he was also motivated by charity. Like many of the wills from Kibworth at this time his charitable provisions for the poor people are noteworthy for a man who was not well-off, and other personal stories may lie behind his bequests. The cowherd William Colman, for example, may be a handicapped relative mentioned in another neighbour’s will as ‘poor Will Colman’. A persistent strand in the wills is the community’s sense of duty to its sick or impoverished members.

‘Slander and scandal’

Tom Colman died in 1538, at the moment when the dissolution of the monasteries was under way and when the Kibworth vicar, William Peyrson, had been arrested for expressing opposition to the king’s religious reforms. It was at this time too that ‘Sir’ Robert Mason, the curate named in Tom Colman’s will as his godfather, also found himself in deep trouble with the church authorities. Mason is the first schoolmaster of Kibworth about whom we have some details, but he fell foul of the Bishop of Lincoln on quite another matter. On 14 March 1540 the bishop instigated a church commission at Kibworth to ‘reconcile’ the church after an alleged scandal. The story is almost incredible. Witnesses said that Mason had ‘defiled’ St Wilfrid’s church by having sex with a married woman inside the church; not mere cuddling or kissing but (‘as it has been asserted’) full sexual congress with ‘emission of semen’ with Isobel Green, the wife of John Green of Kibworth. (The Greens were tenants living in Kibworth Beauchamp: the previous year John had been marked down as a billman in the military muster of the village.) Whether the story was entirely true of course is another matter. The case of Vicar Peyrson less than two years before shows that enemies of traditional religion in the shire – men like John Beaumont – were willing to concoct slanderous stories whenever it suited. Sexual innuendo had been particularly effective in blackening the Catholic church: Beaumont himself had fabricated the tale of two nuns giving birth. It is possible then that Mason was a victim of false accusation. But not entirely false perhaps: it seems unlikely that within such a closed community Isobel Green would have been publicly exposed without some truth to the liaison being acknowledged by the village.

The church was duly cleansed with the appropriate prayers and rituals, and Mason subsequently witnessed land purchases in the village: a charter of that year in the school chest bears his name (‘this charter was written by Sir Robert the priest’). But it seems that ‘Sir’ Robert didn’t long survive the scandal since there is no later record of him. If he had indeed made love to a parishioner’s wife, then his standing with the village had gone. He was succeeded by a clergyman who did have some standing, Richard Pates. But in these increasingly heated times, within a year or so of taking office, in 1541 or 1542, Pates also forfeited his benefice at Kibworth and was attainted for high treason because he failed to ‘accommodate himself to the varying beliefs of those in authority’; that is, to Henry VIII’s religious reforms. In Pates’s case we know a little more about the reasons for his demise, which were more directly ‘political’ – he had committed the offence of corresponding with Cardinal Pole, a committed Catholic who was then in exile. Pates was a clerical diplomat and Kibworth was only one of his benefices, so he was probably not in regular residence in the old rectory on Church Hill. Fortunately for him, he was abroad when his guilt was proclaimed. He did not return to England until Mary’s reign, when he was confirmed as Bishop of Worcester.

So Kibworth vicarage again became a pawn in the bigger game of national politics. From spring 1542 to summer 1553 the vicar was in government terms a safe pair of hands: a Protestant, William Watkyn, who saw Kibworth through the troubled times of Edward VI. But after Mary came to the throne and instituted a return to Catholicism, Watkyn was imprisoned in his turn and deprived of the benefice because of his refusal to comply with Mary’s directives on religious worship. Between 1553 and 1554 Watkyn languished in jail and Kibworth parish was again vacant, administered by its curate and churchwardens. A letter from the Privy Council to the Sheriff and Justices of the Peace in the county of Leicester in 1554 gave permission ‘to set at large William Watkyn, personne of Kybwoorth, out of the gaole of Leicester, yf he be not indicted or attaynted’.

This tale reveals something about local as well as national politics. Some parishes (famously Morebath in Devon) had the same vicar over the whole period from the 1530s to the 1570s, trimming with the wind to steer their parishioners through these great psychological changes. Here one after another they go. But though there may have been religious differences in the village, in some areas the people seem to have been united against the interference of self-seeking grandees like Beaumont. One such was the school. The smaller and poorer religious houses in the Kibworth region were mostly dissolved in 1536; a few continued until 1538–9 along with a few hospitals and almshouses. But the abolition of chantries (by the Acts of 1545 and 1547) had a direct effect on the village school, for the chantry lands provided an income for the chantry priest, who doubled as a schoolmaster. The 1547 Act in fact had stipulated that lands used for the upkeep of a chantry priest could be used in future for the upkeep of a schoolmaster, but in the property grab by government cronies they usually passed to private individuals, and even when village schools survived they often lost their endowed lands. The 1547 Act completely suppressed more than 2,000 chantries and guild chapels. But the school at Kibworth managed not only to survive but to keep most of its endowments. The lord of the manor of Kibworth Beauchamp, John Dudley (Earl of Warwick and later Duke of Northumberland), had an interest in education, and a number of schools owed their survival to him. A hint at Kibworth’s debt to him is found in a witness statement in a seventeenth-century lawsuit. Robert Ray, in giving evidence about the origins of the school, stated:

He has heard Thomas Parker, one of the ancient feoffees of the School, say that the Earl of Northumberland, then lord of the manor of Kibworth Beauchamp, made claim to certain lands in Kibworth and being informed they were employed to so good a use as the maintenance of a school said God forbid I should have them.

‘So that there remain no memory’

On Monday, 17 November 1558, Elizabeth Tudor succeeded to the English throne. The following Sunday after Mass the people of Kibworth poured out of Harcourt and Beauchamp doors to light a bonfire in the lane at the church gate and to hand out a dole of ale, cheese and bread to the poor of the parish. Like every parish in the land Kibworth had celebrated the coming of a new ruler of England with the traditional rituals. That Sunday, the first in Advent, the leading villagers had stood in St Wilfrid’s church and proclaimed the new queen and prayed for a happy and prosperous reign for her. They would have recited ‘Our Father’ and Hail Marys, and their vicar would have chanted the Latin litanies and collects suitable for a Catholic ruler. The mood of the congregation was perhaps nervous after so many reversals of national religious policy in such a short time. Some neighbours and friends were Protestants, some leaned towards Puritanism, many were old Catholics, but the village community had lived with its religious differences for a long time, in the main rubbing along fine.

Elizabeth herself was a sincere Protestant but not a zealous reformer: she had no wish to force people to take communion (she did not want, she said, ‘to open a window on men’s souls’). But she and her advisers were determined to bring her father’s stalled Protestant revolution back on track. In July 1559, Elizabeth’s government brought in injunctions for the final suppression of ‘superstition’ and ‘to plant true religion’. Parish priests (still mainly of Queen Mary’s Church) were instructed to accept new rituals, a new prayer book and the authorized Protestant Bible; altars and images which had so far escaped destruction were to be removed along with surviving wall paintings, stained glass, ritual clothing and chasubles. In many parts of the country churchwardens were required to prepare a document containing an inventory of all the ‘church goods’ together with ‘all the names of all the houselling people in the parish and the names of all them that were buried there since midsummer and was twelvemonth Christened and wedded’ (‘houselling’ – a word Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Old Hamlet’s ghost – meant people who take Catholic communion). For a while some of the pre-Reformation customs which had been outlawed or suspect under Edward were briefly allowed to reassert themselves: the old Rogationtide processions along the parish boundaries, the quaffing of ‘parish ales’, the old ritual of ‘churching’ women who had just given birth – they were isolated for a month after birth, then purified in church, after which a family feast was held. For a while these were seen again in Main Street, but the net was tightening on the old religion.

In Kibworth church, as we have seen, it is not certain whether the Catholic imagery had already gone in Edward’s time. But if not we must now imagine the final changes: the whitewashing of the walls, the selling off of the vestments, chasubles and maniples, some of them probably beautifully embroidered gifts by women of old village families ‘in white damask, and blue velvet’ – what the Puritans liked to call ‘the relics of the Amorites’. What was done in the middle of the sixteenth century can be seen from what remains, especially the stone supports for the rood loft which was dismantled by workmen. The great lifesize painted wooden Christ was perhaps burned on a bonfire outside the church along with the painted image of Our Lady of Kibworth with her blue gown and halo of gold: in the aisle of the nave today a stone washing basin or piscina marks the place where her shrine stood.

The royal injunction had required ‘the removal of all signs of idolatry and superstition, from places of worship so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glasses, windows, or elsewhere within their churches and houses’. For the vicar and his curates and churchwardens, and the village jurymen, it was, one imagines, now a matter of accepting things calmly and getting on with it. The members of one parish in Devon threatened with excommunication because they had failed to remove their rood loft and its crucifix, met and sadly agreed to do it: ‘Foreasmuch as we be excommunicate for not plucking down the rood-loft let us agree together and have it down, that we may be like Christian men again of holy time.’ The likes of Tom and Agnes Colman and their neighbours no doubt would have agreed.

Thomas Ray

Only a few months after these developments Thomas Ray died: he was a well-to-do farmer, and his is the first Kibworth will from the days of the new order of Elizabeth. Ray was typical of ‘modern’ farmers and lesser gentry: an incomer to the village who was very different from the homespun farming class of the Colmans. He even had a ‘feather bed’. The will was made in October, less than a year after Elizabeth’s accession and following the Act of Uniformity. It is stripped of the old Catholic references to the ‘company of heaven’ and the Virgin, still less ‘Our Lady of Kibworth’, though the mother church is still remembered with a small donation. There is no longer any reference to ‘trentals’ of prayers for the soul, nor to intercession from ‘my ghostly father’. But another dimension emerges in Thomas’s will, and that is of private wealth. The will describes a private house with different rooms – parlours, halls and chambers – whereas the Colmans, for example, probably lived in the simple hall house of any ordinary farmer. Thomas’s provisions to the poor (as with many Kibworth wills of this period) are generous. Michael Coxon, who was not at that time a freeholder in the village, is probably Thomas’s foreman or farm manager; though he could be his wife’s brother. Particularly touching is the provision made in case his wife Margaret should remarry and go ‘away from the farm’. As their only son, Nicholas, was still a juvenile, it may be that Margaret was quite a bit younger than Thomas:

In Nomine Dei the year of our lord God 1559 the 18th of October, I Thomas Rey of Kibworth Harcourt In the County of Leicester, gentleman, sick in body but thanks be to God in perfect mind & memory, make & ordain that my last will & testament in manner following. First I bequeath my soul to almighty God & and my body to be buried within the church of the said Kibworth. Item I bequeath to the mother church of Lincoln 4d. Item to the poor of the parish ten shillings. Item I bequeath to Michael Coxon two kine [pigs] and eleven hoggerylles [piglets] one featherbed & all things belonging unto it with part of my apparel at the discretion of my wife, my debts and funeral expenses discharged The residue of my goods unbequeathed I give to Margaret my wife and Nicholas my son whom I make my full executors of all my goods moveable & unmoveable to be distributed betwixt them too by equal portions; also I will that Nicholas my said heir the lease of my farm when he cometh to lawful age with all his goods & if it fortune my wife to marry away from the farm then I will that Michael Coxon have the occupation of that said farm till my son cometh to lawful age & if it fortune that God call my son to his mercy before he come to lawful age Then I Will that his goods be divided equally betwixt my wife & Michael Coxon aforesaid. Also I do make Nicholas Cloudsley superviser that this my last will and testament be performed And for his pains I give him an old ahsell [a donkey?] for a token

The will is witnessed by Rob Carter, Tom Bryan, Michael Coxon and ‘Sir’ Robert Barton the curate, and attached to it is an inventory drawn up by Thomas’s neighbours, Will Clark, Robert Carter, Tom Bryan and Tom Brees, who after his death went round the house with the village notary. The inventory contains fascinating detail of a well-off Kibworth farmhouse in the middle of the Reformation period: a house with new kinds of domestic arrangements, with an upper floor and private parlours and bedrooms. Very likely it is what is today called the Manor House in Main Street, which was then the bailiff’s house. From the inventory Thomas evidently had a brewhouse for brewing ale for the family and its servants and for the agricultural workers; the dyeing of cloths was also done on site. First though are Thomas’s animals and farming gear:

From Ray’s will we can see that in Kibworth the changes in the middle of the sixteenth century are not only psychological but material: no sooner is Purgatory fading away than a possessive individualism is making itself felt. A great rebuilding of domestic housing was well under way now, and for the middle class, people like the Rays, that was accompanied by a sharp rise in the standard of living. Old habits were changing: privacy was more and more sought after; possessions were becoming a mark of status. For those old enough to remember the days of Henry VIII, as was recalled in Ray’s time, ‘three things are marvellously altered in England within their sound remembrance.’ These were the ubiquity of chimneys and fireplaces for private rooms (so striking on the first pictorial depiction of Kibworth from 1609); the accumulation of private possessions in houses; and the variety that middle-class people now expected on the table. In the old world into which Tom Colman’s parents were born, the family lived in a communal hall, where they slept on straw pallets with ‘a good round log under the head’ (pillows were ‘for women in childbed’). In Ray’s house, albeit a fine place for the bailiff on which Merton had lavished considerable expense over 200 years, there were a hall, a buttery, new and old parlours with chambers above both, a kitchen and a domestic storehouse, in addition to all the barns and animal sheds. Indeed, Ray even has a ‘maids parlour’ as well as a ‘mens chamber’ so he kept maids as well as male servants. Employing servants had been customary in the village from the fourteenth century (and of twenty-five servants named in the 1381 Poll Tax nine were women), but Ray’s will seems to mark a new period in the village story. In other houses on Main Street and neighbouring lanes, inventories attached to wills show the same picture: tapestries and painted cloths on the walls, pewter on the table, fine linen and brass, and wooden furniture: a custom ‘now descended yet lower’, said a writer from the 1570s, ‘even into inferior artificers and many farmers who have learned also to garnish their cupboards with plate, their joined beds with tapestry and silk hangings, and their tables with fine napery’. The world of Tudor interiors had arrived in Kibworth, at least at the better end of Main Street.

‘A woman is a worthy wight’

Our last example from the Kibworth wills is the testament of Elizabeth Clarke of Kibworth Beauchamp, which comes from 1580 and is an indicator of the status of a woman in the late-Tudor village. By now the Reformation had passed through several phases and in some regions the Counter-Reformation was making a fightback with Jesuit missions. But in most parts of the country the establishment had triumphed by 1580, and there is no trace of these conflicts in Kibworth. What comes out of Elizabeth’s will is still the typical Tudor concern with charity for the poor as well as her relationship with other women, including her sisters, and her friendships within the village. The detailed inventory of her household goods gives a fascinating insight into a woman’s possessions in Elizabeth’s reign, with bolsters, bedlinen, coverlets and tablecloths. Sadly no books are mentioned (if she possessed books they may not have been valued by assessors Rob Brian and Richard Sharpe, who were middling farmers used to assessing farming estates). It is possible though – even likely – that Elizabeth was literate. In the East Midlands and East Anglia in her lifetime it was not uncommon for women of this class to possess chapbooks and primers, and to read their Matins in English; and there was even a market for devotional books like Whitford’s A Werke for Householders or Nicholas’s Order of Household Instruction. Further back in time Lollard books must have been available in Kibworth, and the importance of Lollard literacy among women may just have left some kind of tradition among the women of the village.

Elizabeth’s gift to the poor represents half a year’s wages for a small husbandman (about £2,500 today on the average earnings index). Elizabeth’s husband was dead at the time of the making of her will (as, it appears, was one of her daughters), and though there is more detail about house furnishings and tableware than about the harness for her ox team, it can be assumed that like all women of her class she knew her way round a farm and knew what was in her barn (spellings have been lightly modernized – by 1580 we are very close to modern spelling – but the language is hers):

In the name of God Amen. I Elizabeth Clarke of Kibworth Beauchamp on the first of June in the year of the lord 1580 and the 22nd of the Queen’s reign being of sound and perfect memory, praised be God, make this my last will and Testament in manner and form following; first I bequeath my soul into the tuition of Christ Jesus my creator and redeemer and my body to be buried in the churchyard of Kibworth. Furthermore I give to the church of Lincoln 2d, I give to the poorman’s box 12d, I bequeath also to Agnes my daughter 46s and 8d and 20 shillings that was her sisters part either in money or money worth, to be paid unto her at the day of her marriage. I give to her two pair of flaxen sheets, four pairs of hempon and harden sheets, a flaxen board [table] cloth, a harden board cloth; one bolster and two pillows, a pair of blankets, four napkins, one towel, a green hillinge, two platters, a pewter dish and a saucer, a brass pot or a noble in money, a brass pan, or 10s in money. A candlestick or 16d in money …

After a similar bequest to her second daughter, Elizabeth, she then turns to her neighbours:

I give to Alice Chapman’s children Anne Wood and William Wood 6s and 8d equally to be divided between them and to be paid them at the age of 16 years. I give also to Alice Chapman’s children Margaret and Thomas 3s 4d between them and to be paid them at the age of sixteen years. I give also to John Clarke 26s 8d to be paid within one year after my decease and 20s among his children to be paid within four year after my departure. I give to Thomas Clarke one half acre of barley and to the children one ewe and a lamb or 5s in money. I give to my two godchildren 6d apiece. I give to Margery Gourde my Sister 12d. I give to Luse [Lucy] Greene my sister 12d and one sheet or 2s. I give also to Alice Poole half a strike of malt, half a strike of mylne corne. I give also to Thomas Martin, Thomas Papennere, John Wright and Richard Heywood every one of them one tolfoot of mylne corne. All the rest of my goods unbequeathed, my funeral expenses being discharged, I give to Laurence my son whom I do make my full executor of this my last Will and Testament. I will that Richard Sharpe and Robert Brian be supervisors to see this my will performed, and they to have for their paines 6d apiece. These being witness Nicholas Decon, Hugh Sothel, John Clarke, with others.

The passing of the old order

Elizabeth’s funeral was held in the churchyard of St Wilfrid’s towards midsummer in 1580. We don’t know how she died, but as most medical cures offered by the village doctor would have been ineffective in relieving pain, it is likely that if she went through a long illness she experienced months or even years of suffering – a time to contemplate her impending death. Like all religious women of her class the art of ‘dying well’ was an important life lesson to be learned. You could even read self-help manuals on how to ‘learn to die’ like Thomas Becon’s Sick Man’s Salve of 1561. With the old certainties no more, an enlarged personal Christian strength and resolve had to be cultivated. Pious women especially were held up as ‘comfortable testimony of godly resolution’.

Her children and close family would have attended her through her last days. But one of the more profound effects of the Protestant Reformation was in the long term to sever the relationship between the dead and the living. Though many traditional beliefs and customs took a long time to fade away, the new Protestant orthodoxy enshrined in the Kibworth vicar’s funeral service was that dead Protestants were now beyond the reach of prayer. Most of the traditional Catholic intercessionary rituals after burial were swept away. Familiar customs that were second nature to the villagers in Henry VIII’s day – trentals, masses, dirges and prayers for the dead – were resolutely set aside. In Elizabeth’s own mind perhaps there still lingered the old familiar prayer which vicar Peyrson had recited for the older generation of the village (it survives in his own words) committing ‘my soule into the handes of Almyghtye God my Creator and Redemer, to Our Blessed Ladye, Most Purest Virgyne, and to all the Holy Companye of Heaven’. But the church ceremony for Elizabeth and her family would have been very different from the pre-Reformation rituals performed by ‘the ghostly fathers’ like Peyrson for Katherine Polle or for Tom and Agnes Colman.

In the old days, as Elizabeth’s older neighbours would have remembered well from their own parents’ funerals, the procession entered the church with the coffin while ‘Sir’ William sang psalms before the great wooden crucifixion above the chancel arch, and wished the soul Godspeed on its journey while sprinkling the body with holy water and censing it with incense:

Almighty and everlasting God we humbly entreat thy mercy, that thou wouldst commend the soul of thy servant, for whose body we perform the due office of burial, to be laid in the bosom of thy patriarch Abraham; that when the day of recognition shall arrive, she may be raised up, at thy biding, among the saints of thy elect.

There over her coffin he and his curates and the village chaplains would have sung the ‘masse and dyrige by note accordyng to the use and custome of the sayd churche and every prest and clerke of the sayd churche …’ And at the end, while candles shimmered around the gilded image of ‘Our Lady of Kibworth’, as had always been done, ‘the great bell shalbe ronge for the space of 6 oures accordyng to the custome of a knell.’

Elizabeth’s funeral though was an altogether starker affair, in a whitewashed church with a Protestant minister in sober black. A version of the committal survived to 1549 – without holy water or incense – but reference to the soul was finally removed under Edward VI in 1552 and was never officially reinstated in the Church of England. The soul went straight to its reward, needing no intercession, commendation or committal. All that was committed was the body to the earth. One bishop’s set of rules for funerals in the 1570s inadvertently reveals the continuing pull of the old country rituals at this time:

no superstition should be committed in them wherein the papists infinitely offend; as in masses, dirges, trentals, singing, ringing, holy water, years’, days’, and month-minds, crosses, pardon letters to be buried with them, mourners, de profundis sung by every lad that could say it, money for the dead, watching of the corpse, bell and banner, and many more that I could reckon.

The Protestant Reformation thus radically revised not only the rituals but the process of salvation itself: as one might say, its conceptual geography. Where do souls go now? The question was of great personal moment in an age tormented by religion: no less an intellect than Hamlet will later frame it, deftly catching the public anxiety. The prayer book of 1552 and its Elizabethan successor which vicar Beridge used at Elizabeth Clarke’s funeral assert that the soul of the elect will immediately live in the Lord, ‘delivered from the burden of the flesh … in joy and felicity’. Instead of petitioning God for favours, he simply rejoiced that ‘it hath pleased thee to deliver this Elizabeth our sister, out of the miseries of this sinful life.’

So the trental of masses paid for by her fellow villagers for almost a thousand years to help the soul through Purgatory was a thing now of mere ‘childish superstition’. Inevitably such things were so ingrained a part of religious practice that it took several decades of preaching, discipline and punishment to draw them to a close. Though ‘not permitted by the laws of this realm’, funeral feasts still persisted in Kibworth as elsewhere; provisions for obits and prayers for souls are still found in local wills in the thirty years before Elizabeth’s death and even after. Anniversaries and communions for the dead may have survived, and of course belief in ghosts took much longer to be done away with. We don’t know whether Elizabeth’s children cast the prohibited flowers on her coffin; though many vicars up and down the land, including perhaps Beridge, made concessions to their parishioners’ feelings as they helped them adjust to ‘the revolution of the time’.

With Elizabeth’s funeral we leave our sketch of the impact of Henry’s Reformation on Kibworth: fifty years in the life of a community about which we can tell little from the official sources. But these last testaments of the villagers give us in their own words a few precious clues to the changes they were living through. In a sense, though, it is the old imperatives of the community which are most vividly revealed in these documents: the continuities of farming life in Kibworth; the importance of land, family and inheritance; the strong links with neighbours and their children; even the care of the poor. But also detectable now, as the old communally organized world is gradually transformed, is the growth of new ideas about property, wealth and individualism which would shape a different future for the people of Kibworth – and, of course, the people of England.