Microhistories tend to emphasize the unique social and cultural characteristics of the places they study, while also seeking to measure relationships between local facts and events with larger cultural patterns and historical themes. Microhistorical method also grounds the scholarship of the local with the questions and analyses prevalent in larger historical discourses. Such is the aim of this book as well. It focuses on five London parishes during the long sixteenth century, sometimes reaching into the medieval period or several decades into the seventeenth century for context. The methodology begins with a reading of extant churchwardens’ accounts to identify their peculiar characteristics while referencing other texts, both primary and secondary, to provide deeper cultural meaning or to locate those traits in larger patterns and gauge their significance. The process is not as simple as equivalency or literalism—i.e., a specific list of entries means exactly what it appears to state. First, we could only wish for such clarity in churchwardens’ accounts. Second, there is a danger in such an approach that one might simply “read” oneself into the records. Historical method and contextualization lessen that problem and are required at every stage. Given the divergence in both quality and quantity of information in the primary sources, other parish records—registers, wills, vestry minutes, inventories, etc.—have been employed to augment their information. What follows are five linked microhistorical studies that show how a basically conservative institution responded to and operated within the momentous cultural metamorphoses that occurred during the era.
The approach has been inspired, in part, by the success of several studies published over the past two decades that have examined parish records scattered across the large geographic areas and employed comparative or statistical methods to discern meaningful patterns.2 These works have provided many insights into England’s parish system, offering information concerning differences between urban and rural settings, larger and smaller parishes, wealthier and poorer ones, and so on. For decades, such statistical approaches have formed the most recognizable method in social history and these contributions to English parish studies will be cited throughout this book. One drawback of this aggregating methodology is a tendency to lose unique local characteristics. Not only might a scholar reading documents across a wide geographic area fail to recognize local meanings or be too focused on comparative methodology to contextualize properly, but the statistical method tends to homogenize certain actions since idiosyncrasies tend to be defined as statistically meaningless. Periodic returns to the local ameliorate this problem and maintain a grounded dialectical discourse.3
For many late medieval and early modern historians, the best-known, iconic examples of microhistories would be Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, and, of course, the essays contained in Natalie Zemon Davis’ Society and Culture in Early Modern France and her exceptional book The Return of Martin Guerre.4 Carlo Ginzburg once stated that he first encountered the word “microhistory” in the late 1950s, but decades later, microhistory is a recognizable approach to historical scholarship, complete with canonical texts and methods.5 As applied to this study, microhistorical analysis includes the reconstruction of parochial relationships, establishing how people mattered in a parish, analyzing how language was infused both with local and official meanings, and sketching the relationships between parish culture and society versus the authoritative standards of official institutions, official dictums, and published texts.6
Selecting which parishes to study required some reflection. Location mattered. The five parishes featured in this study existed in various parts of the city of London, which allows for a greater sense of London society and culture. Source survival was another key factor in selecting parishes: significant survival of churchwardens’ accounts from across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries established a positive attribute, especially records that contained full and interesting bits of information. In the end, I chose three—Saint Michael Cornhill, Saint Stephen Coleman Street, and Saint Peter Westcheap—based upon this criterion. These chapters take the reader across all the great changes of the Tudor era. Additionally, I chose two parishes—Allhallows London Wall and St Botolph Aldgate—because of the focus of their extant records; the first was a poorer parish with a richly documented pre-Reformation culture, and the second endured the best documented factional fight in London during the reign of Edward VI—both issues of significant interest to Tudor scholars. Finally, these five parishes have not been the focus of scholarly attention in recent years.
Proper contextualization of parish sources requires a constant reference to other areas of study: London historiography, parish studies, demographic history, London social history, Reformation history, and the Tudors. Some historiographic sketches will appear in the chapters as such discussions become relevant, and others will appear in this introduction. The main aims of the book are threefold: (1) to afford an exploration into the varied experiences of these parish communities throughout the era of the long Tudor era; (2) to demonstrate how London experienced a much greater, more fundamental cultural transformation than one might expect from examining more theologically oriented studies of the era; and (3) to elucidate how each parish’s social organization rallied to meet problems and requirements as they appeared. In fact, reconstructing core members of the parish elite and their actions is a common thread in all five chapters.
Conclusions tend to focus more on the unique aspects of parish societies and their differences in ordering parish life, but comparisons may be found throughout. All London parishes exhibited the same basic arc of transformation. Everything transformed: the city, the church, the faith, the parish, and the parish leadership. As a result, the very vocabulary being employed in the accounts may possess a fluid nature. The nature of the extant records not only varies from parish to parish, but internally too; “idiosyncratic” has long been a modifier employed to describe the irregular appearance and disappearance of certain items and obligations, while a few parishes leave what might only be described as rough notes for some years, and other parishes were certainly keeping multiple accounts with uneven rates of survival. While this book is not a study of mentalities, behind each entry in a churchwardens’ account lay a myriad of assumptions—some inchoate, others more concrete. It will always be an exercise that involves a bit of guesswork, but historians must be cognizant of the mental universe of the people who produced these records.
It needs to be stated that just because the major primary sources of this book were created by parish officials, churchwardens, in the age of the English Reformations, this is not a study about the Reformation of those parishes. Religion matters, of course, but the main methodology and interpretation fall in the realm of microhistory. The relationship between parish records and parish belief quickly becomes a quagmire; most records were not created to offer testimonies of faith, rather they mostly demonstrate actions being taken and, perhaps, compliance to government orders, but corporate behavior also seems to imply some sort of accommodation if not outright acceptance of religious practices. Historians have been debating this issue for decades and most recognize the vast difference between individual belief and public compliance. Because the focus of this study was a religious culture, the analysis of parish society constantly engages religious practices, teachings, and debates. The changes in faith, while just one aspect of the tremendous changes experienced by the Tudor world, represents an emotional and dramatic topic and, therefore, it appears throughout, but the focus of this book remains the social dimension of religion.
The London context
Between 1485 and 1603, London did the following: (1) quadrupled in population; (2) transformed from a medieval Christian culture to a post-Reformation-era evangelical one; (3) experienced periodic outbreaks of contagion; and (4) struggled through times of economic turmoil with a period of near economic collapse at mid-century when the government debased the coins, followed by decades of inflation in the later Elizabethan era. The London of 1603 had changed a great deal since Henry VII’s first arrival in 1485. The city’s inhabitants faced challenges—sometimes waves of challenges—that they could never have envisioned. The city’s churchwardens frequently found themselves at the center of these social transformations because many sixteenth-century authorities viewed the parish as the institution through which appropriate responses ought to be launched to meet the onslaught of social and cultural transformation.
The most fundamental urban change of the period was demographic, as London’s population grew from about 50,000 in 1500, to about 70,000 by mid-century, and to over 200,000 by 1600, although much of the additional population growth in the later Elizabethan era settled in the expanding suburbs located outside the old city wall.7 The hustle and bustle of crowded streets received comment in some sources. Jacob Rathberg, a German visitor to the city in 1592, described London’s byways as so crowded and dangerous that “one can scarcely pass along the streets on account of the throng,” and that “street-boys and apprentices collect together in immense crowds and strike to the right and the left unmercifully without regard to person.”8 Other late Elizabethan authors also attested to London’s growth, such as author John Stow, who complained of the disappearance of fields under new buildings as the city grew and who also documented the inadequate government response to the city’s growth.9
Despite a fourfold increase in population, London manifested a negative birthrate throughout the early modern era.10 Methodologies involving demographic history have been debated over the last few decades, but the primary sources are the parish registers.11 The city’s registers present widely divergent christening/burial ratios. Between 1540 and 1600, there were 509 christenings performed at Saint Nicholas Acons and 661 burials, implying a percentage of births to deaths approaching 77 percent, and several other parishes recorded similarly low ratios.12 Conversely, other parishes manifested the opposite pattern in their registers, where the number of christenings exceeded the number of burials, such as at Saint Matthew Friday Street (128 percent).13 In the aggregate, Roger Finlay estimated that the overall ratio of baptisms to burials for the city was 87 percent.14
Demographic parameters cannot be ascertained by simply measuring baptisms and burials, but the range in ratios of christenings to burials demonstrates just one aspect of the variations that parish leaders faced in dealing with the basic realities of city life.15 A favored explanation for the pattern is a high death rate caused by contagion since poor hygiene and unhealthy environs incubated disease.16 Parishes along the river tended to possess higher mortality rates than did the others, but their location can offer only a partial explanation.17 Disease could devastate parish populations and also particular families within a parish, especially the outbreaks of bubonic plague that struck hardest in 1537–39, 1547–48, 1563, 1593, and 1603.18 Paul Slack estimates that even moderate annual outbreaks could raise the death rate between 10 and 20 percent.19 The 1603 plague cost London an estimated 30,578 lives between 14 June and 31 December, according to a note in the registers of Saint Peter Cornhill.20 At Saint Margaret Lothbury, where an estimated 279 communicants lived, the epidemic of 1593 helped produce 115 burials, with eighty-four occurring during the summer months.21 Contagion hit unevenly across the city, leaving some parishes more devastated than others.
When the plague struck, it was, in the words of Paul Slack, “concentrated socially and geographically.”22 Wealth, location, and population density were three of the factors that influenced that variation in plague deaths, as well as London’s general pattern of a negative birth rate during the non-plague years, but factors such as “high mortality, low fertility, [and] a differentiated age structure” also played a role.23 The ratio of men to women and the age of first marriage also mattered and, once again, that pattern varied from parish to parish. Death came to each parish in different ways, taking away different numbers of men, women, and children, and leaving the survivors in a variety of social configurations to carry on. Migration from the countryside replenished the city’s—and most parishes’—dwindling numbers.24 Roger Finlay analyzed registers from select city parishes and concluded that those areas around the Royal Exchange housed a core population that remained rather stable; those located on the periphery were less socially anchored.25
Most city parishes tended to occupy between two and five acres, although the peripheral ones were much larger.26 Population estimates for the Tudor era may be based upon the work of the Royal Commissioners of 1547–48, which identifies among the city’s smaller parishes Saint Mary Staining with ninety-eight communicants.27 Peripheral parishes tended to occupy the opposite end of the spectrum with both large geographic areas and large populations, such as Saint Sepulchre without Newgate with 3,400 communicants.28 Between five hundred and one thousand people inhabited most city parishes.29
A sketch of demographic variations among London’s parish populations must also account for another group, because beyond the parish there were the others: the ghost-like vagabonds whose numbers grew as the century passed, many of whom, in the Elizabethan era, were whipped and sent on their way; or those who died anonymously in the street, unknown and barely connected to London society. This last group does not receive mention in the tax assessments but occasionally appears in burial registers, or in the records of those who paid the burial costs, in the churchwardens’ accounts. One morning the parish masters of Saint Botolph Aldgate found
A young man vagrant having no abyding place … who dyed in the streete before the dore of Joseph Haynes a braseyer dwelling at the signe of Robin Hood in the high striete … he was abowte xviij yeres owld I colde not learne his name.30
Many people suffered similar fates. In 1603–04, the parish at Saint Stephen Coleman Street paid 3s. 10d. to bury “one that died of the plague in the street and another in the fields.”31
Where the indigent folk originated is another topic open to debate, but by the Elizabethan period the wandering poor were a major social concern. With the relatively rapid rise of the English population in the latter part of the sixteenth century, many may have been pushed out of their rural villages for want of a place and made the trip to London in the hopes a better life. A.L. Beier has argued that a significant percentage of vagrants, perhaps 20 to 30 percent, were either born in London or else had lived there for a while.32 If Beier is correct, then the appearance of large numbers of wandering poor at the end of the Tudor period was even more of a London phenomenon, offering proof of even harsher social disruptions in the city.33 Regardless, as far as the government was concerned, the parish was an appropriate place to deal with them, and parish officials were the appropriate agents of oversight—and the government’s directives tended to demand action from parish leaders without regard to parish population or wealth. Poor relief became a constant concern for some churchwardens, finding expression in their accounts or in vestry minutes, but other parishes barely mention the topic in their records. This pattern implies that not only was the issue more taxing for some than for others, but that some parishes must have dealt with poor relief in ways that kept most of their efforts out of the extant records.
The rapid growth in population helped to create a degree of insecurity in London society. Youths, apprentices, and servants found themselves in increasingly more vulnerable situations—easily dispensable and disposable into the world of the transient poor—at the very time that the more established Londoners feared the ramifications of uncontrolled and undirected urban growth. This elite fear finds expressions in many ways, but could perhaps explain why parish officials of Saint Dunstan in the East attempted to prevent the poor of the parish from accepting boarders into their chambers and tenements. What probably seemed to the poorer sort a manner of raising money—and perhaps a way to help newly arriving friends and relatives—was seen by the parish elites as way to “increase … poverty in this Parish and to the great hurt of the same, by multiple of many children and great famelies.”34 Thus, the “worshipful and other of the parish” agreed that visitors to the poorer alleys who stayed more than six days needed a special license. Failure to comply resulted in the loss of all parish aid to the guilty household.
The parish system
As implied in this sketch of Tudor London’s demographic characteristics, parishes were part of the cultural and social fabric of the city long before the Tudor era. In 1485, the parish system was a part of the ancient and seemingly immutable ecclesiastical estate. Most city parishes dated to the end of the twelfth century, with the crucial period of foundation and church construction occurring between 1150 and 1250, although a few parishes rested on earlier foundations, and minor variations in the overall number occurred between the twelfth to fifteenth centuries.35 In the High Middle Ages, a good estimate for the number of city parishes was ca. 110, but ninety-seven represents a good estimate for the late Tudor era.36 These estimates, of course, do not include the Cathedral, any of the ca. thirty-nine religious houses that operated in or near the city before the dissolution, or any of the numerous chapels.37 The point is simply that London’s system of parishes in the sixteenth century was both centuries-old and malleable.
Shifting population patterns necessitated some adjustments in the number of parishes, as did the building of other structures.38 Some parish churches began as chapels, but most probably began when small groups of individuals united to establish them.39 Tudor London differed greatly from the overall Western European pattern, given that most continental cities in this era had relatively few parishes served by rather large churches. Because it was different, the foreign travelers sometimes noticed a vibrant and flourishing system of neighborhood churches and their parishes in late medieval and early modern London.40 They sometimes left comments on that system since it struck them as so unique. London’s parishes promoted social order, which was a vital function considering the chaotic urban conditions described by foreign travelers, the constant threat of violence perceived by civic rulers, and the profound cultural and social transformations identified by contemporaries and by modern historians.41
The parish officials
Such important institutions required numerous officials to oversee them. Churchwardens were lay officials who began to emerge in the twelfth century and would become responsible for the maintenance of the fabrics, ornaments, and furniture of the church, as well as the churchyard—partly in response to canonical demands and partly because of lay desires.42 Documentation of churchwardens’ activities follow, but unlike most of the kingdom in which the laity maintained the nave while the rector supported the chancel, no such distinction became a London tradition.43 As a result of gifts and bequests, and sometimes direct parish acquisition, London’s churchwardens might have to deal with parish property. Some city churchwardens oversaw rental property, paying for property maintenance, collecting rents, and helping to negotiate leases; others did not. A parish boundary could mark a very different set of circumstances for the churchwardens, with neighboring wardens pursuing vastly different tasks.44
Churchwardens evolved into a significant part of parish administration and new tasks fell to them throughout the sixteenth century.45 Their office also achieved definition in the common law throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the occupant “enabled … to take moveable goods, or chattels, and to sue, and be sued at the law, concerning such goods, for the use and profit of their parish.”46 A 1606 study of the common law proclaimed the churchwardens responsible for moveable goods and the parson responsible for lands and church buildings—but once again the London churchwardens operated differently.47 In the final analysis, London’s churchwardens were parochial agents with duties defined by tradition, the parish’s requirements, church and state directives, the common law, and the direction of the parish community. What any of that might mean was defined by a given parish and its history, size, population, and wealth—all of which becomes the frequently unaddressed context of parish records and of many modern studies of the English Reformation and Tudor society.
As the Tudor era continued to emphasize and even transform the general policing duties already possessed by the churchwarden, the relationship between parish leaders and the wider community altered. A provision in the second Edwardian Uniformity Act of 1552, reiterated in the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity of 1559, made church attendance mandatory at the local parish (leaving no clear statement as to who should enforce this act at the parish level), but the requirement created a new set of questions that the bishop and archdeacon could put forth to the churchwarden, or information which the churchwarden could henceforth volunteer to the bishop and archdeacon.48 The greatest definition of the churchwarden’s office came with the Church Canons of 1571, which piled numerous obligations on the office.49 The canons—which were not adopted for the kingdom at large, but which were instituted in London—emphasized that it was the churchwardens’ responsibility to oversee parish attendance. Tasks such as that one, according to J.C. Cox, became the reason why many individuals preferred to pay fines rather than serve in the office. Evidence of such behavior does not flood the pages of the historic record, but in 1609 two men paid the parish of Saint Christopher le Stocks an astounding £10 each to free themselves of “from the office of the churchwarden”; there are no specific reasons provided.50 What is certain is that local circumstances shaped how these legal definitions impacted the London parish. The churchwardens’ accounts demonstrate the final resolution of several social, political, and economic negotiations aimed at navigating the ever-changing array of social, cultural, economic, and religious variables that shape the history of Tudor London. In each parish, churchwardens developed a wide variety of fundraising practices that represented local desires and strategies to achieve specific goals; they also developed unique financial obligations too.51 Lastly, they responded to royal, episcopal, and civic authorities and did their duty. Thus, their records tend to offer proof of compliance.
In addition to the churchwardens, other parish officials either emerged or became more apparent in the records, including clerks, sextons, sidemen, vestrymen, scavengers, rakers, and more—and their tasks were also defined and redefined; a Tudor-era London parish could be a rather busy place.52 Londoners added aisles, chapels, organs, and chantries to their churches while also installing, moving, and removing numerous images, graves, memorials, and bits of furniture long before the changes connected to the Reformation required many of these attributions to be reconsidered.53 All of these changes needed organization and money, and it was the churchwardens who worked to raise the requisite money and who tended to oversee the construction projects.54 They might also oversee work for local improvements, such as street cleaning and poor relief. The parish vestry became more visible in the records as the Tudor age passed, and the evidence generally proves vestry participation in many of these tasks, too.55 The vestry at Saint Martin Outwich levied rates on parish households for the clerk’s wage in October 1545.56 The vestry at Allhallows Staining, as did some other parishes, created a written “constitution” of the parish offices and operations in the aftermath of the Church Canons of 1571.57 The parish at Saint Stephen Walbrook supported a scholar at Cambridge and on 7 July 1585 heard read to them his letter of “humble thanks.”58 These examples, and the numerous examples that will be cited throughout the book, help to illustrate how London’s parishes served the needs of a vibrant city; parish officials had to be open to change and transformation. Ironically, many innovations appeared within the recognizably traditional patterns of parish operations and, thus, probably seemed to be less of a transformation than might otherwise have been the case.
Churchwardens’ accounts59
Churchwardens faced a parish audit at the end of their tenure at which they explained the details of their activities with results typically recorded by a scribe. Later, sometimes centuries later, these accounts were bundled together and classified as churchwardens’ accounts, and, as Charles Drew wrote in 1946, the archival classification of churchwardens’ accounts can be a bit artificial.60 First, some accounts may contain inventories, parish meetings, and other sorts of evidence.61 Second, the records changed over time, especially as Tudor culture evolved. Skepticism has been expressed by some academics concerning the validity of employing these sources as if they were a unified classification of records presenting a comprehensive set of information.62 The degree of variation that exists in the parish records emphasizes a tendency for London’s parishes to possess different sources of income and different ratios of income from them. There were many ways to fund parish activities, and the whole phenomenon of the Reformation did little to homogenize that endeavor.
For London, churchwardens’ accounts survive from forty-five parishes prior to 1603, but the years covered vary from parish to parish, and there is no discernible pattern to their creation or survival. Eleven parishes have records that date to the fifteenth century, and some provide details for decades on end while others simply provide a run of a few years:
A further six extant churchwardens’ accounts begin prior to the tumultuous events of the 1530s:
The evidence from these seventeen parishes provides detailed information about pre-Reformation parish culture in London. The remaining Tudor-era churchwardens’ accounts start in random years, indicating that no unified response to any government initiative motivated their production. Therefore, the early motives were probably local, defined by the experiences of each parish, with the survival of the records being somewhat subject to happenstance, and the information contained within these accounts is by no means uniform or complete.65 However, the gradual increase in the aggregate number of extant accounts from different parishes surely reflects the evolution of the churchwardens’ office, the increasing importance of the concerns of the churchwarden, and the increased responsibility of the churchwardens and the parish to demonstrate compliance to local, national, and ecclesiastical traditions. An urban society’s appreciation of financial records was perhaps also a factor. The survival of the churchwardens’ accounts in larger numbers indicates, at some level, the culture’s recognition that the records were worth maintaining and saving; the records represent the growing importance of documenting the churchwardens’ tasks.
Historiography
Among studies of the Reformation, Susan Brigden’s London and the Reformation is the most important but is now several decades old. A massive work, there is at the heart of it a traditional approach, with a thematic and chronological organization that generally parallels the vision of A.G. Dickens, except, of course, that the focus is on London and not all of England.66 As a result, beginning with a first chapter that examines “The Catholic Community,” there follows a thick description of the city’s religious practices and quirks, heresies, discontents, bishops, preachers, and so on. Brigden makes references to the city’s many parishes, citing numerous examples from this or that one, but sometimes without contextualizing either the parish sources or the events they describe. Published in the late 1980s and based on research done even earlier, Brigden’s work pre-dates the publication of several important parish studies in the 1990s, but her work provides a study of the city’s Reformation, filled with standard events, texts, and people, and an interpretation that is more theologically oriented than anything else, identifying weaknesses and problems with the traditional faith and seeking to map a conversion process. Brigden’s impressive work is cited throughout this study, but ultimately the emphasis on a theologically defined London Reformation seems less applicable to the evidence from the parish records than is the case for other sources.
Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars is also cited throughout this study because, while it is not focused on London, it is an excellent compendium of the practices and pieties of late medieval Christianity. Duffy states in his Introduction that “[i]t is the contention of the first part of the book that late medieval Catholicism exerted an enormously strong, diverse, and vigorous hold over the imagination and loyalty of the people up to the very moment of the Reformation.”67 Two issues jump out from such a statement: (1) one of the goals of Duffy’s study was to defend against the old charge of a moribund faith trapped in a crumbling and corrupt pre-Reformation edifice, and (2) his approach to the practice of the faith was top-down, or, as with Susan Brigden, theology came first. If one looks for diversity in beliefs and practices, and evidence of the local appropriation of religion, this approach is backwards. However, Duffy’s work is another example of excellent scholarship that presents a worthy guide through the sometimes-curious pious practices of a different time.
Since the publication of Ethan H. Shagan’s Popular Politics and the English Reformation, a different paradigm for the period has influenced Tudor-era scholarship. Shagan rejects an overly theological approach to the Reformation, stating that two ancient Christians paradigms of conversion experiences—Saint Paul’s and Saint Augustine’s—have been too influential in analyses of England’s religious transformation under the Tudors. Shagan writes,
[w]ithout ever denying that some English people may indeed have experienced the Reformation through the lens of a pre-existing and immaculate conscience, I have argued that in Tudor England most people ‘forged’ new consciences to navigate the unprecedented circumstances in which they found themselves.68
While Shagan studies neither London, nor churchwardens’ accounts (which he finds “two-dimensional” in their representations), his approach and methodology inspire. The caveat is that London is always different and was known to harbor evangelicals fairly early in the game, and so the role of conversions, martyrdoms, texts, and theology must play some role, but it has, without a doubt, been exaggerated. Shagan does not deny any of this, but the presence of an evangelical voice was more powerful in London than in most of the kingdom.
Given the examination of parish communities, the focus throughout this study is less on individuals, less on the theological, and more on the communal and corporate. The social aspect of religion has been one of the most studied of topics from the Tudor era, especially examination of the sacramental system of the pre-Reformation church as a means to understanding community. In the 1980s, John Bossy (drawing some methodological inspiration from Durkheimian sociology) argued that both the mass and the sacramental system operated in late medieval society by articulating and strengthening social bonds among parishioners.69 Church rituals helped to bring people together, added a sacred dimension to relationships, and made clear a person’s place in society. Bossy has had his critics—including Will Coster, who argued for a less rigid model of social relationships, especially for the topic of godparentage—but the social impact of religious practices has remained uncontested.70 Bossy represented religion as a cultural force that helped society cohere, which would suggest that only a strong force could have altered the situation in a short period of time, a concept endorsed wholeheartedly by Eamon Duffy, who demonstrated the complete impracticality of separating religion from the social history of the pre-Reformation period, arguing that the government’s attack on traditional religious practice aimed at the social as well as the theological expressions of the medieval belief system.71 Yet many students of the English Reformations have trouble seeing the religious changes of 1530–70 explained entirely—or even largely—by coercive force.72 Ethan Shagan suggested approaching the Reformation as a process that occurred step-by-step with the cooperation of parishioners, not necessarily because of their theological beliefs, but, rather, inspired by a range of motivations and compromises. In other words, the English people cooperated with the government’s changes because it seemed, at each instance, to be in their best interest.73 Because some evidence from London indicates evangelical activity quite early in the Reformation era, the impulse to associate with the new theology any and all changes documented in London’s parishes must be resisted as too facile; the parish records simply do not provide such specificity.
Churchwardens’ accounts do provide information that fits within the rubric of incremental transformation simply because they document payments for change over time. The laity bought, sold, or repaired physical objects and they also helped to organize events; the evidence, therefore, leads to the edifice of the church, especially its internal space, and how parishioners established a material foundation for the sacramental system of the medieval church followed by a space for a reformed liturgy. This topic requires discussion of two divergent, but related debates concerning the interpretation and analysis of churchwardens’ accounts: first, a divide in approaches to the genre; and second, a debate over appropriate methodologies.
Starting with the issues of approaches, the very nature of the records must be kept in mind. While the records of the Tudor era were certainly created based on the precedent of earlier examples of such records, the nature of the records also transformed as the complexities of the Tudor era unfolded. Malcom Richardson studied the records of late medieval London and has argued that merchants not only realized that “knowledge was power” prior to 1485, but that records from the livery companies might cite a passage from a Letter Book or some other civic document as a way to make readily accessible some important requirement; moreover, the London merchants also demonstrated “a critical attitude towards texts which, while highly conservative … helped prepare the way for Humanist scholarly attitudes.”74 As Richardson observed, many an English humanist came from this social milieu. One might also wonder how many London churchwardens cited other texts (and it will be shown in Chapter 4 that they did).
Concerning methodological divides, Beat Kümin launched a sophisticated and extensive analysis of churchwardens’ accounts from across England to gauge the communal efforts expressed in such records and to offer comment on the social coherence of the English parishes. He drew from a sociological approach, while also being guided by the theory of communalization as argued in the work of Peter Blickle, which encouraged a stronger reflection on horizontal ties of significance and communal action to counter a perceived scholarly emphasis on vertical social ties.75 Writing at a time when the concept of community as a category of historical analysis was being challenged, Kümin’s approach emphasized horizontal ties of social belonging and sought to map local initiatives to social problems.76 He concludes that communal responses to parish obligations during the pre-Reformation era may have established a crucial foundation for the religious and political transformations in English history throughout the Tudor and into the Stuart eras.77
Katherine French presented a more anthropological approach, arguing that both literate and oral cultures informed the creation of the churchwardens’ accounts. One of the important events in the writing of the accounts was the audit: a ritualized oral presentation at which a scribe wrote down a final account in the presence of the parish. Authorship was corporate, and the content of the accounts served agendas other than a reckoning of credits and debits. French contends, “The laity expressed and acted upon their understanding of community through their involvement in parish activities, whether they were participating in the liturgy or the repair of the church building.”78 Given that this was the case, the contents of the accounts could and should be read as documents that kept common memories containing information that would prove culturally important for promoting future relationships. Written at a time when sociological approaches dominated the approach to parish records, French’s anthropological approach allowed her to seek the communal values expressed within the records and the process of recordkeeping.
A final observation regarding methodological debates: a series of essays published in the English Historical Review between 2002 and 2005 evince a discussion that should inform scholarship based on these sources.79 In the aftermath of several statistical studies of the evidence contained in churchwardens’ accounts, Clive Burgess examined a series of problems inherent in the sources, specifically their idiosyncratic nature and apparently haphazard documentation of parish activities. He encouraged greater grounding of the records in the history and culture of the specific parish that had produced them. In fact, Burgess argued that quantitative methodologies, as applied to churchwardens’ accounts, might lend itself to—or even create—the illusion that the records contain some complete picture of parish activities: “[neither] … is it possible to derive statistics that mean anything very much when relying only on the tranche of activities budgeted in surviving churchwardens’ accounts.”80 Beat Kümin responded with a spirited defense of that method, arguing that statistics offered no magical look into the content of parish records, but that it was a useful technique for ascertaining trends and patterns.81 Burgess responded, holding to his original position.82 Finally, Ronald Hutton entered the fray by justifying his use of discreet citations of individual lines from accounts in his book The Rise and Fall of Merry England, not because churchwardens’ accounts represent some perfect repository of past ceremonies and practices, but because they do document certain events or actions of interest to social and cultural historians.83
Informed by that historiographical debate, this book employs certain methodologies throughout: first, an analytical reading of the parish records, especially the churchwardens’ accounts, to identify their unique qualities and attributes; second, a comparative reference to other parishes to aid in the interpretation of those specific entries or patterns to gain a more complete sense of each parish’s uniqueness; third, contextualization to debates in the literature. Yet a microhistorical analysis of five different parishes is, in the end, an examination of unique parish societies that left different amounts of records and a different assortment of records, all detailing from their own perspective a different range of problems, concerns, strategies, and agendas. Therefore, each parish’s records require contextualization within a different set of debates in the historiography.
Parish officials’ other pursuits
The works of Ian Archer and Steve Rappaport are also cited throughout this study, especially their books on London society and livery companies, which are two solid yet vastly different examples of scholarship: Rappaport is focused internally, on members within companies and their increase or decrease in wealth and position; Archer has a more flexible social model and looks outwardly in his examination of how the companies operated in the city’s society. The livery companies created social and economic networks that were very powerful because their members occupied city offices, and the companies influenced access to gaining the freedom of the city since an individual had to gain the livery prior to gaining the freedom. London’s parishes were frequently dominated by members of the city’s companies, but the parish also included many other inhabitants too. Thus, the parish represented a different sort of institution that helped shape urban society, but some parishes operated with close oversight from specific companies while other parishes did not.
It is an important fact that most of the men who filled parish offices in London were members of one of the various city companies. These parish/company associations spread across London. Company halls were located throughout the city. Occupational concerns could render certain regions of the city more or less attractive to craftsmen, thus making craft an important cultural and political force in some parishes. For example, mercers tended to reside near the Mercery or in nearby parishes, although mercers also spread into other areas.84 The parish of Holy Trinity the Less exhibited this craft-influenced economic pattern at the end of the Elizabethan period when fifteen churchwardens were merchant-tailors, five were clothworkers, four were vintners, and one each was a barber-surgeon, carpenter, draper, fishmonger, glazier, mercer, salter, and tallow-chandler.85 In the reign of James I, the church windows displayed the arms of the Merchant-tailors.86 Occupational concerns varied and influenced parishes in numerous ways, from a company owning the advowson to members of a craft living in a parish in certain higher or lower concentrations.87
In the fifteenth century, the Salters’ Livery had a tradition of burying their members in the Chapel of the Holy Trinity in Allhallows Bread Street; after 1520, they lost that right but could bury significant benefactors (but not “the meaner kind of people”) in the Chapel of Corpus Christi within the same church. The company held services on “All Hallows, Christmas, and two days after … [the Feast of the] … Circumcision, Epiphany, and the Purification of the Blessed Mary” and they also celebrated Mass on the Feast of Corpus Christi there, but the chapels were open to all. The arrangement between the Salters’ Company and Allhallows Bread Street required at least one mediating decree from the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1469.88 A livery company could have a profound influence on this or that parish depending on the location of the hall, residential patterns, and more.
One wonders about the degree to which the liveries’ cultures influenced these men in their approach to exercising authority in the parish. Companies organized dinners, prayers, and memorials to promote the prestige of their company and a sense of community, and a perusal of their records indicates the rich cultural life that brought its members together. In 1528–29, the Coopers’ accounts recorded entries for dinners associated with the election of the new mayor and the burial of a member’s wife:
Pd for the compenys denar the day that my Lord mayor kept hys denar after wecome hom from westmynster xiij s. iiij d.
Pd at the goodman totyngtons wyffe Buryall for meit & drynke for the company at the garland ij s. ij d. 89
The Ironmongers’ accounts for 1539–41 acknowledged the purchases of sweet wine, Gascony wine, Suffolk cheese, banbury cheese, spicebread, and a “kylderkyn”90 ale, undoubtedly for company dinners.91 A set of ordinances created by the Grocers declared that suppers held more than once a year should “abide ferme and stabill[e]” forever more so that the entire fellowship in their livery should attend.92 When Queen Mary traveled by barge to the Tower on 28 September 1553, the Vintners accompanied her in their barge; they hired extra men to row, a troupe of minstrels, and they provided two gallons of wine for all involved.93 Similarly, in 1553, the Grocers hired a barge to accompany the mayor on his 29 October procession to Westminster.94 On 14 June 1554, the Brewers’ Company paid 10 s. 6 d. for the “receiving” into London of Prince Philip of Spain.95 They paid to erect stands and rented blue carpeting for the event. In 1557–58, the Brewers also “paid and laid out” first twenty-eight soldiers, and then thirty-six soldiers for the use of the “King and Queenes majestie” in the war against France.
Expenditures for obits, dirges, and “solemn masses” in the early sixteenth century demonstrate the importance of mortuary observances for the livery companies. Rituals associated with the theology of purgatory created numerous obligations (and numerous opportunities for affirmation of group boundaries and significance) throughout the early Tudor period. The pattern most likely characterized the communal life of all the livery companies, but not all the records present clear evidence of it. Still, it seems that the two worlds merged at certain times and for certain endeavors.
Each parish contained a core of established inhabitants who were relatively wealthy for the area in question, that parish’s elite, who might be rather poor and marginal when compared to their neighbors in the next parish. Regardless, the stable core was composed of the “goodmen” and “goodwomen,” or sometimes the “masters,” or even the “worthy” of the community, those who could afford to occupy desirable local properties for relatively lengthy periods of time.96 They became the more stable population within each parish, the “substantial” and “discreet” citizens who ran the institutions of the parish, the ward, and the City.97 Its members were also the churchwardens, vestrymen, and master-craftsmen, men who spent a great deal of their lives, and much of their tenure as a churchwarden or vestryman, in the busy, self-focused, masculine, ritualized, and wealthy world of the companies.98 Sometimes privileged connections may be created simply by the right sort of people dealing with each other, especially if they are accustomed to so doing.99 The records from Saint Peter Westcheap offers the most consistent evidence of the influence of the craft culture, but it appears in other chapters too.
The parish ideal
This study demonstrates—first and foremost—the vast differences among London parishes and that microhistorical analysis of this most fundamental of institutions in the city is worth studying for insights into crucial issues such as the local neighborhood, local fundraising, conflict resolution, religious reform, and poor relief. The London parish operated as a multifaceted urban institution, dealing with a myriad of social, economic, and legal issues. Economically, the London parishes existed across a range of income levels, funded by a variety of income sources. As a religious institution, the parish transformed during of the Reformation, but always expressed its own unique local culture.
The parish ideal must also be remembered. The churchwardens often emphasized values such as peace, unity, and goodwill in their records, sometimes suggested by the employment of the word “love”; by so doing, the churchwardens’ accounts present an idealized view of their parish while debates and conflicts are seldom mentioned. Conflicts could be stifled in cultures that privileged status and deference to status; tradition and precedence tended to be revered as well and further quashed social division. The authors of parish records invariably explained their recorded actions with reference to the required task and, sometimes, with the language of parish unity.100 The insistence on unity not only represented an idealized view of the parish, but also became a powerful tool for isolating and silencing opposing voices in the locality. This tactic would prove even stronger if an alderman and/or a knight attended vestry meetings, as they did at Saint Bartholomew by the Exchange in the 1570s, or if two members of the Court of Common Council attended vestry meetings, as occurred at Saint Mildred in the Poultry in 1612.101 Faced with such an audience only the most dedicated would be emboldened to speak an unpopular opinion or disfavored position. It could happen, but respectful deference was more the norm.
From the twelfth century, when Londoners filled their city with small neighborhood parishes, through the Tudor period and beyond, those parishes were treated by the church and the government as a single system of basically equal components. Therefore, parish officials had to take care of certain problems, keep certain sorts of records, maintain the established religion, and so on. The similarities of the parishes resided in their legal definitions and the religious responsibilities and obligations, but also in the endless communal efforts to achieve a variety of ends. As numerous statutes and proclamations made clear, the parish had legal obligations to achieve specific actions in the Tudor political system. All of these assumptions further bolstered the culture’s ideal parish.
This study’s organization has a chronological foundation. The material from Allhallows London Wall is pre-1535 and thus allows for examination of a parish before the great changes. It was one of the poorer city parishes but possessed an active community that often pulled together to solve problems. St Michael Cornhill was in the city center and it was a prosperous parish, and a compact one, with an apparently unified parish elite, many of whom were drapers. The chapter examines the mid-fifteenth to late sixteenth centuries and provides an overview of the transformations of the entire era, but in a unique way. Rather then seek evidence of individual religious belief, the chapter traces major corporate changes that transform the foundation of public religion. Saint Stephen Coleman Street, another parish located against the city Wall, was large and inhabited with numerous poor people. Its extant records provide a great deal of information regarding these poor parishioners and demonstrate a basic continuity of social and cultural factors across the period. Throughout, the religious fervor was remarkable, but, of course, the religion transformed. At Saint Botolph Aldgate, in an essay narrowly focused on 1547 to 1555, a close analysis of the churchwardens’ accounts offers a new reading of a parish conflict that occurred as the second year of Edward’s reign began. What has always been presented as a conflict with a few traditionalists who resisted reform was in fact a much more complex dust-up. This is the largest parish in this study, it was situated beyond the Wall, and as the parish leaders faced the new ecclesiastical policies there emerged a fight among those who should have been working together. Lastly, with Saint Peter Westcheap, the focus moves back to the central part of the city, to Cheapside, near the cathedral. This was a parish with numerous goldsmiths and it possessed the largest concentration of wealth of these five parishes. As with Chapter 3, the continuity of the basic socio-economic factors of the parish continued to create the same sort of parish society, regardless of the Reformation divide. Therefore, from center to periphery, the book offers insight into the variety of parish and urban life.
In the final analysis, none of the five parishes in this study was “typical,” but many of their endeavors were. Parish records afford sufficient hints and glimpses into some local London neighborhoods where some people mattered, others mattered less, and most were invisible. On 29 December 1569, at Saint Bartholomew Exchange, Mr. Colclough was granted
the pue on the right hand cūmyng in to the Churche wher mother phesaunt Comonly dyd sytt for him self wt licens to sett a Lock and bolt upon the same promising further to mayntayne the Repacōns wch after that should be fownd nedefull for the same pue.102
Mr. Colclough was a member of vestry, and he counted. He possessed place, wealth, position, and masculinity. While the language suggests that “mother phesaunt” had died, if an individual lacked any of the privileged qualities, then the more insecure her situation became. Of course, proper behavior—conforming to social expectations, behaving correctly—would keep such an individual in a less privileged position from having to answer to vestries, wardmotes, sheriffs, and archdeacons. Proper behavior might earn him or her a desirable reputation as a “worthy poor” or an “honest” member of the parish. With such a reputation, if the time came that one needed assistance, one might receive it.
The city’s parishes manifested many similarities, but they were never quite the same institution. The London parish presented a place for social and religious negotiations. Ironically, this idealized attribute of the parish, which so many modern scholars find intriguing, seldom got the level of documentation that so many other more mundane pursuits did, but a microhistorical approach helps to make it clear. Throughout the era, churchwardens collected money, kept track of that money, bought what was required, and sought to implement traditional practices, or the new requirements, and also a myriad of government dictates and community decisions. They produced records to prove what that they had done. Those records are sometimes frustrating, but always fascinating. And those records documents how parish officials and parishioners alike transformed their world.
Notes
1 Some of the information in this Introduction has previously been published in Gary G. Gibbs, “London Parish Records and Parish Studies: Texts, Contexts, and the Debates over Appropriate Methods,” in Andrew Foster and Valerie Hitchman (eds.), Views from the Parish: Churchwardens’ Accounts c. 1500–c. 1800 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2016): 63–88; and Gary Gibbs, “The Parish Records of Tudor London,” in Dee Dyas (ed.), The Story of the Church of England, an interactive DVD (York: Centre for Christianity and Culture, The University of York, 2010).
2 Gabriel Byng, Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Katherine L. French, The Good Women of the Parish (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Katherine L. French, The People of the Parish (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); and Beat A. Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish, c.1400–1560 (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1996).
3 Clive Burgess, The Right Ordering of Souls: The Parish of All Saints’ Bristol on the Eve of the Reformation (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018).
4 Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975) and Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Vintage, 1979); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (New York: Penguin, 1982).
5 Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi, and Anne C. Tedeschi, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20(1) (1993): 10–11.
6 Matti Peltonen, “Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research,” History & Theory 40(3) (2001): 347–59.
7 Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 238. For the estimate of ca. 70,000, see A.L. Beier and Roger Finlay, “The Significance of the Metropolis,” in A.L. Beier and Roger Finlay (eds.), The Making of the Metropolis: Essays in the Social and Economic History of London, 1500–1700 (London: Longhams, 1986): 8; Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 3; Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London, 1580–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 51; Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 15.
8 William B. Rye (ed.), England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First (New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1967): 7.
9 Rachel Ramsey, “The Language of Urbanization in Stow’s Survey of London,” PQ 3 & 4 (2006): 252 and 259.
10 Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 8; Steve Rappaport, World within World: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 76–7; E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconsideration (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 166; for an argument that early modern European cities would not have declined without migration, see Allan Sharlin, “Natural Decrease in Early Modern Cities: A Reconsideration,” P&P 79 (1978): 126–38.
11 Roger Finlay and Beatrice Shrearer, “Population Growth and Suburban Expansion,” in A.L. Beier and R. Finlay (eds), The Making of the Metropolis: Essays in the Social and Economic History of London, 1500–1700 (London: Longhams, 1986): 41.
12 Allhallows London Wall (71 percent), Saint Dionis Backchurch (64 percent), Saint Helen Bishopsgate (74 percent), Saint Mary Aldermary (86 percent), Saint Mary Somerset (73 percent), Saint Peter Cornhill (84 percent), and Saint Thomas the Apostle (84 percent). See, Joseph L. Chester (ed.), The Reiester Booke of Saynte De’nis Backchurch parishe (City of London) for Maryages, Christenynges, and Buryalles, Begynnynge in the Yeare of Our Lord God 1538 (London: Harleian Society, 1878); Joseph L. Chester (ed.), The Parish Registers of St. Mary Aldermary, London, Containing the Marriages, Baptisms, and Burials From 1558 to 1754 (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1880); William Brigg (ed.), The Register Book of the Parish of St. Nicholas Acons, London. 1539–1812 (Leeds: Walker and Laycock, 1890); Joseph L. Chester (ed.), The Parish Registers of St. Thomas the Apostle, London, Containing the Marriages, Baptisms, and Burials From 1558 to 1754. (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1881); and, Finlay, Population and Metropolis, 59. The parish information provided by Finlay—Saint Peter Cornhill, Saint Helen Bishopsgate, Saint Mary Somerset, Allhallows London Wall—covered the years 1580–1650.
13 Allhallows Bread Street (104 percent), Saint Antholin Budge Row (111 percent), Saint Christopher le Stocks (114 percent), Saint Lawrence Jewry (108 percent), Saint Mary Woolchurch Haw (106 percent), and Saint Mary Woolnoth (104 percent). See Joseph L. Chester and George J. Armytage (eds.), The Parish Registers of St. Antholin, Budge Row, London, Containing the Marriages, Baptisms, and Burials from 1538 to 1754 (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1883); J.M.S. Brooke and A.W.C. Hallen (eds.), The Transcript of the Registers of the United Parishes of S. Mary Woolnoth and S. Mary Woolchurch Haw, in the City of London, from their Commencement 1538 to 1760 (London: Bowles and Sons, 1886); and Finlay, Population and Metropolis, 59. The parish information provided by Finlay—Allhallows Bread Street, Saint Christopher le Stocks, Saint Lawrence Jewry—covered the years 1580–1650.
14 Finlay, Population and Metropolis, 59.
15 Roger Finlay, “The Accuracy of the London Parish Registers, 1580–1653,” PS 32(1) (1978): 95–112; Sharlin, “Natural Decrease in Early Modern Cities,” 175.
16 This was a typical characteristic of European cities in the medieval and early modern eras. For example, Frankfurt-am-Main grew from 11,500 inhabitants to 27,500 between 1500 and 1700, yet births exceeded deaths in only twenty of those 200 years. See Paul H. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985): 89–97.
17 Finlay, Population and Metropolis, 17.
18 Charles J. Cox, The Parish Registers of England (London: Methuen, 1910): 144; Vanessa Harding, The Living and the Dead in Paris and London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 24; Finlay, Population and Metropolis, 17; Wrigley and Schofield. The Population History of England, 1541–1871, 81–2.
19 Paul Slack, “Metropolitan Government in Crisis: The Response to the Plague,” in Beier and Finlay, The Making of the Metropolis, 61.
20 Cox, The Parish Registers of England, 147.
21 C.J. Kitching (ed.), London and Middlesex Chantry Certificates, 1548 (London: London Record Society, 1980): 26–7; Edwin Freshfield (ed.), The Vestry Minute Book of the Parish of St. Margaret Lothbury in the City of London, 1571–1677 (London: Rixon and Arnold, 1887): xxvi–xxvii.
22 Slack, “Metropolitan Government in Crisis,” 62.
23 Chris Galley, “A Model of Early Model Urban Demography,” EHR 48 (1995): 448; see also E.A. Wrigley, “The Effect of Migration on the Estimation of Marriage Age in Family Reconstruction Studies,” PS 48, 1 (1994): 81–97.
24 A.L. Beier, “Social Problems in Elizabethan London,” JIH 9, 2 (1978): 205; Finlay, Population and Metropolis, 10; see also Keith Lindley, “The Structure of Stability in Early Modern London,” HJ 34 (1991): 985–90; Jeremy P. Boulton, Neighborhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 47.
25 For evidence regarding the integrity of Registers, see Finlay, “The Accuracy of the London Parish Registers, 1580–1653”; and Finlay, Population and Metropolis, 14 and 46.
26 Rappaport, World within Worlds, 183; Harding, The Living and the Dead in Paris and London, 35; Joseph P. Ward, “Metropolitan London,” in Robert Tittler and Norman Leslie Jones (eds.), A Companion to Tudor England (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2004): 350.
27 Vanessa Harding, “The Population of London, 1550–1700: A Review of the Published Evidence,” LJ 15 (1990): 115–16. See also, Kitching, London and Middlesex Chantry Certificates, 1548, 44; and Boulton, Neighborhood and Society, 14, 18–19, and 19 ff.
28 Saint Giles Cripplegate (2,440 communicants), Saint Botolph without Aldgate (1,130), Saint Botolph without Aldersgate (1,100), Saint Andrew Holborn (1,000), and the parishes of Saint Dunstan in the West and Saint Dunstan in the East with 900 communicants each. Kitching, London and Middlesex Chantry Certificates, 1548, 8; 10; 12–13; 30; 40; and 43.
29 Assuming a population of 50,000/97 gives a population of ca. 515.5; assuming a population of 100,000/97 gives a population of ca. 1031; if one assumes that the population within the old walls capped at ca. 70,000, then the population average would be ca. 722. Of course, the urban population would not have been spread evenly. Vanessa Harding employs different estimates: “The mean size of parish populations within the wall in 1548 was around 300, within a range from 150 to 1,200.” For those parishes outside the walls, “populations there ranged from 1,200 to 4,500 …” Harding, The Living and the Dead, 35–6; VCH London: 287.
30 Thomas Rodgers Forbes, Chronicle from Aldgate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971): 80.
31 The CWA and VM of Saint Stephen Coleman Street, 1486–1640, LMA MS P69/STE1/B/012/MS04457/001.
32 A.L. Beier, “Social Problems in Elizabethan London,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9(1978): 203–21 at 206.
33 Ibid.: 208.
34 The CWA and VM of Saint Dunstan in the East, LMA MS 1494–1509, P69/DUN1/B/001/MS04887, fo. 261.
35 Christopher N.L. Brooke and Gillian Keir, London, 800–1216: The Shaping of a City (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975): 122–3; Glendinning Nash, History of S. Alphage, London Wall, and Elsynge Priory (Beverley: Wright and Hoggard, Minster Press, 1919): 5; John Schofield, The Building of London: From the Conquest to the Great Fire (London: British Museum Press, 1984): 81–2; John Schofield, “Medieval Parish Churches in the City of London: the Archaeological Evidence,” in Katherine French, Gary Gibbs, and Beat Kümin (eds.), The Parish in English Life, 1400–1600 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997): 37; and John Schofield, “Saxon and Medieval Parish Churches in the City of London: A Review,” Transactions of London and Middlesex Archaeological Society 45 (1994): 24; Christopher Thomas, The Archaeology of Medieval London (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2002): 40; W.E. Tate, The Parish Chest: A Study of the Records of Parochial Administration in England (Chichester: Phillimore, 2000): 10–12; VCH, 1: 400–1.
36 Susan Brigden, “Religion and Social Obligation in Early Sixteenth-Century London,” P&P 103 (1984): 72; W.K. Jordan, The Charities of London, 1480–1660: The Aspirations and Achievements of the Urban Society (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1960): 15–16. Schofield, “Saxon and Medieval Parish Churches,” 41; and John Stow, A Survey of London (2 vols, London: 1603, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 2: 138–43.
37 The number of religious houses can change depending on geographic boundaries—intra-mural, Westminster, Southwark, Middlesex—and definition—alms houses, hospitals, colleges, anchorites, etc. Susan Brigden uses the number thirty-nine, I have cited the larger number provided by The Religious Houses of London and Middlesex, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Matthew Davies (London: Centre for Metropolitan History and Victorian County History, 2007): 5 and back cover; Brigden, London and the Reformation: 6. For chapels, see Nicholas Orme, “Church and Chapel in Medieval England,” TRHS 6th series, 6 (1996): 80.
38 See John Schofield, “Medieval Parish Churches in the City of London: The Archaeological Evidence,” entries for Allhallows Staining: 89–90; St. Alban Wood Street: 64, 91–2; and, Saint Helens Bishopsgate: 104–10.
39 Thomas, The Archaeology of Medieval London, 40; Schofield, “Saxon and Medieval Parish Churches in London: A Review.”
40 R. Ford, “Bohemian Embassy to England, Spain, etc. in 1466,” Quarterly Review 180 (1852): 413–44; Nina Cust, Gentleman Errant (London: John Murray, 1909); and W.D. Robson-Scott, German Travelers in England, 1400–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953): 5–6.
41 Daniel E. Thiery, Polluting the Sacred: Violence, Faith, and the Civilizing of Parishioners in Late Medieval England (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
42 Kümin, The Shaping of a Community, 19–21.
43 For a history of the development of the office of the churchwarden, see Cox, Churchwardens’ Accounts, 1–3; Charles Drew, Early Parochial Organisation in England: The Origins of the Office of the Churchwarden (London: St. Anthony’s Press, 1954); French, The People of the Parish, 72–3; A. Tindal Hart, The Man in the Pew, 1558–1660 (New York: Humanities Press, 1966): Chapter 3; Eric Carlson, “The Origins, Functions and Status of the Office of the Churchwarden, with Particular Reference to the Diocese of Ely,” in Margaret Spufford (ed.), The World of Rural Dissenters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 164–207; Kümin, The Shaping of a Community, 22–42; and VCH London: 224. For a general history of accounting, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1200–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
44 Gabriel Byng provides a brief historiographic sketch of the debates over the function of the churchwardens. See Byng, Church Building and Society, 137–8.
45 Cox, Churchwardens’ Accounts, 1–3.
46 Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: 24 and 24ff. Kümin provides this translation of Law French, citing H. Rolle, Un Abridgement dea plusieurs cases del common ley (London, 1668), f. 393.
47 William Lombard, The Duties of Constables, Borsholders, Tythingmen, and such other lowe and Lay Ministers of the Peace. Whereunto be adioyned, the several offices of church Ministers and Churchwardens, and Overseers for the Poor, Surveighours of Highwaies, distributors of the provision against noysome fowle and vermine (London: 1606): 58–68.
48 Carlson, “The Origins, Functions and Status,” 171.
49 Leo F. Solt, Church and State in Early Modern England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990): 100–1.
50 Edwin Freshfield (ed.), The Accomptes of the Churchwardens of the Paryshe of St. Christofer’s in London (London: Rixon and Arnold, 1885): 44.
51 French, The People of the Parish, Chapter 4; and Kümin, The Shaping of a Community, Chapter 3.3.
52 Kümin, The Shaping of the Community, 22–32.
53 See, for example, Robert Whiting, The Reformation of the Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
54 They could also establish committees to oversee tasks. See Byng, Church Building and Society, Chapter 4.
55 J.F. Merritt, “Contested Legitimacy and the Ambiguous Rise of Vestries in Early Modern London,” HJ 54 (2011): 25–45.
56 The CWA and VM of the Church of St Martin Outwich, 1508–1546, LMA MS P69/MTN3, 1545.
57 The VM of Allhallows Staining, 1574–1655: LMA MS P69/ALH6/B/001/MS04957/001, 1574.
58 The VM of Saint Stephen Walbrook, 1587–1623, LMA MS P69/STE2/B/001/MS00594/001, fo. 12r.
59 This section draws from Gibbs, “London Parish Records and Parish Studies,” esp. 73–5. Published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
60 Charles Drew, “Lambeth, and the Lambeth Churchwardens’ Books,” in Charles Drew (ed.), Lambeth Churchwardens’ Accounts, 1504–1645, and Vestry Book, 1610 (London: Butler and Tanner for the Surrey Record Society, 1946).
61 Ibid., xii–xiii and lv. Andrew Foster, “Churchwardens’ Accounts of Early Modern England and Wales: Some Problems to Note, but Much to Be Gained,” in French, Gibbs, and Kümin, The Parish, 76–9.
62 Clive Burgess, “Pre-Reformation Churchwardens’ Accounts and Parish Government: Lessons from London and Bristol,” EHR 117 (2002): 306–32.
63 Joan Bullock-Anderson, Clare Clubb, and Jacqueline Cox, Guildhall Library Research Guides Supplementary Series: No 1: A Guide to Archives and Manuscripts at Guildhall Library 2nd edn (London: Corporation of London, Guildhall Library Publications, 1990); online, see “Sources: London Parishes and Chapels,” in Derek Keene and Vanessa Harding (eds.), A Survey of Documentary Sources for Property Holding in London before the Great Fire (London: London Record Society, 1985), 113–43. British History Online, available at: www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol22/113-143 (accessed August 4, 2018); hereafter cited as Keene and Harding.
64 Bullock-Anderson, Clubb, and Cox (eds.), A Guide to Archives and Manuscripts at Guildhall Library.; and Keene and Harding. “Sources: London Parishes and Chapels.”
65 Burgess, “Pre-Reformation Churchwardens’ Accounts,” 312.
66 A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 2nd edn (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
67 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1700 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992): 4.
68 Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 309.
69 John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200–1700,” P&P, 100 (1983): 29–61, later developed more fully in Christianity and the West, 1200–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
70 Will Coster, Baptism and Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002): 1–12.
71 Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 2–3.
72 Muriel C. McClendon, The Quiet Reformation: Magistrates and the Emergence of Protestantism in Tudor Norwich (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
73 Shagan, Popular Politics, 272.
74 Malcolm Richardson, Middle-Class Writing in Late Medieval London (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011): 83 and 172–3.
75 Burgess, “Pre-Reformation Churchwardens’ Accounts,” 311; Kümin, The Shaping of a Community, 260.
76 Christine Carpenter, “Gentry and Community in Medieval England,” JBS 33 (1994): 340–80; Miri Rubin, “Small Groups: Identity and Solidarity in the Late Medieval Ages,” in Jennifer Kermode (ed.), Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth-Century England (Wolfesboro, NH: Alan Sutton, 1991): 132–50; and Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: 260–1.
77 Kümin, The Shaping of a Community, 262.
78 French, The People of the Parish, 23.
79 Gibbs, “London Parish Records and Parish Studies.”
80 Burgess, “Pre-Reformation Churchwardens’ Accounts,” 330.
81 Kümin, The Shaping of a Community; Beat A. Kümin, “Late Medieval Churchwardens’ Accounts and Parish Government: Looking Beyond London and Bristol,” EHR 119 (2004): 87–99.
82 Clive Burgess, “The Broader Church? A Rejoinder to ‘Looking Beyond,’” EHR 119 (2004): 110–16.
83 Ronald Hutton, “Seasonal Festivity in Late Medieval England: Some Further Reflections,” EHR 120 (2005): 66–79; Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
84 Anne F. Sutton, The Mercery of London: Trade, Goods, and People (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005): 194.
85 The CWA of Holy Trinity the Less, 1582–1662, LMA MS P69/TRI3/B/004/MS04835/001.
86 J.F. Merritt, “Puritans, Laudians, and the Phenomenon of Church-Building in Jacobean London,” THJ 41 (1998): 944–5.
87 The work of Thomas R. Forbes on seventeenth-century residential patterns supports this view. He found a high concentration of clothworkers and supporting crafts in the parish of Saint Giles without Cripplegate. See, Thomas Rodgers Forbes, “Weaver and Cordwainer: Occupations in the Parish of Saint Giles without Cripplegate, London, in 1564–1693 and 1729–1743,” GSLH 4 (1980): 119–32.
88 Salters’ Company, MS B2/1: “Grant from the Church, 26 October 1520.” I wish to thank archivist Katie George for a transcription of this record. See also Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 206.
89 GL MS 5606/1: Wardens’ Accounts, Coopers’ Company, 1529–71, fo. 1r.
90 kilderkin = “a cask … varying from 16 to 18 gallons,” in Middle English Dictionary, available at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary.
91 GL MS 16988/2: Wardens’ Accounts, Ironmongers’ Company, 1541–92, fo. 26.
92 GL MS 11570/A: Remembrances, Wardens’ Accounts, Grocers’ Company, 1463–57, fo. 2r.
93 GL MS 15333/1: Wardens’ Accounts, Vintners’ Company, 1522–82, 1553.
94 GL MS 11571/5: Quires of Wardens’ Accounts, Grocers’ Company, 1534–55, fo. 450.
95 GL MS 5442/3: Wardens’ Accounts, Brewers’ Company, 1547–62, 1554–55.
96 Gabriel Byng proves the significance of local elites in running English parishes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and even documents their methods and the social impact of those methods.
97 These were the phrases used in the Liber Albus to describe the “respectable” sort. Liber Albus: 17.
98 Kümin, The Shaping of a Community, 31–41; and, Clive Burgess, “Shaping the Parish: St. Mary at Hill, London, in the Fifteen Century,” in John Blair and Brian Golding (eds.), The Cloister and the World: Essays in Honour of Barbara Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996): 261.
99 Laura Branch, Faith and Fraternity: London Livery Companies in the Reformation, 1510–1603 (Leiden: Brill, 2017): Chapter 1.
100 Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 84.
101 Edwin Freshfield (ed.), The Vestry Minute Books of the Parish of St Bartholomew Exchange in the City of London, 1567–1676 (London: Rixon and Arnold, 1890): 1–3; Thomas Milbourn, The History of the City Church of St Mildred the Virgin, Poultry, in the City of London, with Some Particulars of the Church of St Mary Colechurch (Destroyed in the Great Fire, A.D.1666) (London: John Russell Smith, 1872): 51.
102 Edwin Freshfield (ed.), The Vestry Minute Book of the Parish of St Margaret Lothbury in the City of London, 1571–1677 (London: Rixon and Arnold, 1887): 2.