2

Saint Michael Cornhill: Foundational transformations, ca. 1450–1610

“The English Reformations”

The English Reformations present a complex historical problem partly because of (1) the central role of the government; (2) the influence of the monarchs; and (3) the policy flip-flop that occurred during the 1550s. Henry VIII was a traditionalist who promoted parliamentary legislation that validated his marriage to Anne Boleyn, separated the Church of England from the Church of Rome, introduced some humanist reforms, and recognized the king as the Supreme Head of the Church. With the succession of Edward VI in 1547, England experienced a period of legislated Protestant reform. The death of Edward brought his half-sister, Mary I, to the throne in 1553. Her reign initiated a program of re-Catholicization, complete with a return to papal obedience, between 1553 and 1558. The succession of Elizabeth I brought about another separation from Rome and introduced religious reforms once again. This general outline obscures the more fundamental patterns of Tudor-era religion and, since the 1960s, many social histories have tried to gauge the currents of belief quite apart from royal policies.¹

Some historians argue that attempts to trace the religious transformation of Londoners through parish records are doomed to failure because those sources were not written to document conversion experiences. Their authorship was corporate and aimed at proving maintenance of parish wealth and properties, or compliance with established laws, or simply at showing how the churchwardens had dealt with parish money.² This chapter aims at a different tack. The focus remains firmly on parish records and the local institution, while acknowledging the impossibility of gauging issues such as dissatisfaction with the traditional church or conversion to the reformed faith. The records from Saint Michael Cornhill demonstrate how the Reformation changed the parish institution. Therefore, an evaluation of these records results in a more realistic understanding of how Londoners experienced the English Reformations. In 1530, the inhabitants of the city participated enthusiastically in a medieval Christian faith, while forty years later, in 1570, the urban culture was ardently Calvinist. It would seem that there should be evidence of widespread evangelization, but instead parish sources indicate a long and mostly quiet time of gradual change, punctuated by periods of intense activity.

Saint Michael Cornhill experienced several transitions that altered the fundamental operation of the parish. There was no moment of conversion, when medieval Christians became early modern Protestants, instead the function of the local institution transformed, sometimes leaving better documentation, while the belief among the parishioners somehow changed as well, seldom leaving any documentation.³ The corporate and the individual are different, obviously, but neither may they be completely separated. The architectural changes of mid-century, for example, related to required liturgical innovations and concomitant theological positions, and ultimately conformed to emerging reformed ideas. The influence upon individual belief is as undeniable as it is unmeasurable. So, the focus here will be on the former.

The records reveal how Saint Michael Cornhill operated in a fundamentally different fashion in a culture that also operated in a fundamentally different way in less than a century. The process of going from one to the other included the following transformative experiences: (1) the sale of the advowson; (2) changes in the parish’s basic demographic characteristics; (3) the end of the cult of saints and the removal of their images; (4) the removal of traditional monuments and memorials from the church; (5) the change in fabric and furniture, including the removal of altars, sale of vestments, the disposal of other liturgical items, and the introduction of communion tables, communion cup, and sermons; (6) and finally operational trends, including an increased role of the vestry in parish governance, a greater focus on sermons in the parish, and a growing emphasis on institutionalized poor relief as a moral and legal parish obligation. Through all the changes, an elite group of merchants, many of whom were drapers, helped to direct parish operations through the changing world.

First things

Saint Michael Cornhill was one of the oldest parishes in the city (Figure 2.1), dating back to Saxon times, and Evesham Abbey controlled the advowson between 1055 and 1505–06, theoretically appointing curates to serve the parish.⁴ In 1457, the churchwardens went to the guildhall to pay 8 d. to obtain a copy of “the appointments of the offerings made between the parsons and parishioners,” and in 1474 the parish obtained for the parson a cope with coat of arms.⁵ Neither of these entries reveals much information regarding the relationships among parishioners, curates, and abbots, but the abbot granted to Saint Michael the rights to most parish lands in exchange for the payment of one mark rent as well as lodging and other incidentals during his trips to London.⁶ Evesham Abbey was a noted Marian pilgrimage site, and a symbolic association with an important Marian devotion and pilgrimage site might have meant something in the religious culture of the pre-Reformation city, given the significance of Michael and Mary as powerful intercessors who would be present at the Last Judgment: Mary praying for souls and Michael weighing them.⁷

Figure 2.1 St Michael Cornhill parish, 1520

Parishes must be constructed mentally as well as physically, and parish records reveal certain shared assumptions.⁸ At Saint Michael Cornhill, parishioners promoted a sense of community in numerous ways, expressed connections to one another, and facilitated the creation of a common memory. Given that the records detail the maintenance of a space employed for observance of the liturgy, and as a place to remember the dead, they should be approached appropriately. The changes of mid-century succeeded in transforming numerous aspects of church architecture, thus altering the setting for spiritual rituals in a newly emerging religious landscape. The arc of change begins with a fifteenth-century parish church filled with saints and focused on praying for the dead, while the late Elizabethan parish focused on sermons and the institutional distributions of poor relief.

One complication of a study of this parish concerns the extant accounts. They are only partial reckonings, a fact that becomes evident upon brief reflection. The fifteenth-century accounts under-report the wealth and activities of the parish. The parish was situated in a moderately wealthy location a short distance away from the richest areas of Tudor London; many parishioners enjoyed a degree of wealth and social prestige, and many belonged to the same livery company, the Drapers.⁹ Yet the churchwardens report fundraising based upon a few burials and collections for a handful of saints’ days or liturgical feasts, while a few of the post-1548 accounts have multiple accounts that survive; if only one survives, it might contain language that suggests other accounts were also kept.¹⁰ Notations in the extant accounts from other parishes reveal the existence of multiple accounts, almost none of which have survived, but offering proof that the financing of London churches was a complicated and complex affair.¹¹

For the nineteen years covered in the fifteenth-century accounts (1456–75), income was based primarily on collections. These collections formed a major part of the parish’s documented income, augmented by assorted fees connected to funerals, interments, knells, and obits. Typical collections may be represented by the 1460 accounts, which recorded gatherings on All Hallows Day (3 s. 8 d.), Christmas (8 s. 4 d. ob.), Easter (7 s. 4 d. ob.), Midsummer (Saint John the Baptist) (6 s. 9 d.), and Michaelmas (7 s. 1 d.), for a total of 33 s. 3 d.¹² Burials added a further 23 s. 4 d., for an annual income of £2 16 s. 7 d.

The pattern placed at least one gathering day in each season, with additional collections sometimes occurring: the Sunday after Michaelmas (1458), the Sunday after Christmas day (1467, 1469, 1470), the Sunday after Easter (1470), two weeks after Easter (1470), New Year’s Day (1467), Twelfth Day (1470), the 22nd day of January (1469), Saint Peter’s Day (1469), and an Evensong collection (1470). The benefit of having such collections as the basis of parish fundraising is that the number could be increased or decreased as circumstances dictated. The disadvantage, of course, was that the amounts tended to be low and unpredictable. After 1466, when a surplus appeared in the accounts because the parish received £8 from John Gugge, pewterer, as well as another payment from “the Coteler that wedded Swannes wyf,” the number of collections lessened for 1468, but they increase again, and there is no proof of causation for the fluctuation.¹³

In the final analysis, it is not credible that the levels of fifteenth-century income were sufficient to pay for church maintenance and parish operations, and the amount of money raised comes nowhere near the levels of income in some of London’s other prosperous churches. With the presence of images and statues, six altars, numerous tombs and numerous prayer requests, the parish somehow maintained a space that celebrated the intercession of the saints, made concrete the teaching of purgatory, and had multiple points to celebrate mass. It was one of the showcase churches of the city, according to John Schofield, who also described Saint Michael as “one of the richest parishes in medieval times,” but with an average annual income of £9 16 s. 0 d. reported in the fifteenth-century churchwardens’ accounts, parish wealth was not registered in those records.¹⁴ The parish must have had some other system for recording the money it received from the additional income sources that it most certainly possessed, especially related to mortuary endowments.¹⁵

In the fifteenth century, Saint Michael Cornhill celebrated three diurnal masses: matins, terce, and evensong, and they rang bells for twenty minutes before each.¹⁶ The parish possessed a library with an impressive number of books and also a cloistered churchyard.¹⁷ Repairs were a constant concern, such as to the churchyard and the churchyard cross in 1471: “It[em] paid … for making of the cros in the chyrche yerde & for naylles & for tymbr for the cros & ffor the carpets labour.”¹⁸ John Rudstone, draper, alderman, and Lord Mayor, donated a new cross to the churchyard in 1528, and his action became just one of many important, visible examples of patronage in the parish.¹⁹

The churchwardens’ accounts reveal a variety of typical expenses, including payments for interments, church repairs, lead for the roof, cleaning and mending of vestments, the general cleaning of the church, ladders, locks, and sacks of lime, but they still fail to present a convincing list of economic activity for a major parish church. Only twice do the fifteenth-century accounts mention the feast of Corpus Christi (1459, 1467). Saint Michael had pews and segregated seating for men and women.²⁰ There was an organ, which was a common feature of London churches by the Tudor era.²¹ Situated around the high altar were four large, free-standing candlesticks.²² The Lady chapel contained a chest, pews, a window, and one chained but unidentified book.²³ Saint Katherine’s chapel possessed two psalters and multiple windows.²⁴ The church also had altars for Saint Anne, Saint Margaret, Saint Michael, and another identified as Mr. Alderman’s altar.²⁵ The fifteenth-century evidence proves the integration of the interior space with the theological teachings of the church: multiple altars afforded many places to celebrate mass to the honor of saints, for guilds, and for souls in purgatory. Tombs and memorials created representations of the departed throughout the church, and images of the saints were also ubiquitous. This changed within a short period of time, leaving a nearly blank palette.

The transfer of the advowson

The first major change of the sixteenth century had nothing to do with the topics usually associated with studies of the Reformation. The parish’s centuries-long association with Evesham Abbey came to an end. The Drapers’ Company’s acquisition of the benefice in 1505–06 was, in the words of one historian, “a complicated affair” that resulted in a convoluted series of negotiations.²⁶ The company’s wardens sent wine to the bishop, the abbot, and, apparently, the parishioners, as a part of a multistage process that moved control of the benefice first to prominent members of the company, and then over to the company itself.²⁷ Pope Alexander VI issued a bull that authorized the Bishop of London and the Dean of Salisbury to oversee the process for an annual payment of £5 6 s. 8 d., and periodic payments to the Abbot of Evesham may be found in the wardens’ accounts of the Drapers’ Company during the subsequent years.²⁸ In 1504–05, the Abbot of Evesham disputed the transfer, and several more negotiations took place until the company paid £40 17 s. 8 d. for “the expense and cost” of one “master John Brugge” to gather the evidence and clear up the problem.²⁹ The Abbot soon agreed, once again, to the transfer, and the Drapers sponsored a mass at Saint Michael on “the Sunday next after the assumption of our Lady and a mass requiem on the morrow…15 s. 6 d.” The company also appointed Peter Drayton as the parson of the parish in July 1511.³⁰ When Drayton died in 1517, the company elected Rowland Phillips with twenty out of twenty-five votes.³¹ The entire negotiation for the transfer of the advowson in 1505–06 had been conducted at social levels above that of the average parishioner: the Abbot of Evesham, the officials of the Drapers’ Company, Pope Alexander VI, and the Bishop of London. Parishioners would have known about the politics, of course, especially those who were drapers.

Drapers mattered in this parish. The company appointed the vicars from 1506 onward, and they negotiated with parish officials for services and memorials.³² It was a situation that appeared to have some problems, such as when the company had to deal with the churchwardens’ refusal to deliver a particular surplice to the newly appointed rector Rowland Phillips.³³ Lines between the two institutions merged just a bit as the Drapers maintained chaplains in the church and sometimes brought the clergy into company debates, and, at least on one occasion, members of the Drapers’ Company attended a meeting of the parish vestry in 1568.³⁴ Numerous entries reveal the churchwardens’ dealings with the complex legal process required to register parish property: paying for counsel, to the recorder’s clerk, to the Bishop of London’s household to gain seals, to the Bishop’s clerk, to register the deeds, to Drapers’ Hall, and for the Drapers’ Clerk.³⁵ The process was in actuality a complex series of negotiations that had to be done with generosity, deference, and some degree of finesse—and that required the approval of the Drapers’ Company. The churchwardens sometimes made gifts to both the company and the bishop to smooth the way.³⁶

Parish society and economy

The demographic and economic foundations of parish society indicate moderate change within established social parameters, but it was the sort of change that caused anxiety throughout Tudor London. This was a prosperous parish, and hints of parish and ward wealth may be found scattered throughout the parish records. In 1357, John de Stodeye, the Lord Mayor, issued a proclamation concerning poultry sellers and regulating their market area “along the wall towards the west of the Church of Saint Michael on Cornhulle.”³⁷ The early fifteenth century witnessed the restoration of the church’s steeple, which, by 1430, contained six bells, with one donated by a parishioner and alderman named William Rus (Russe), all of which represented an impressive expenditure of wealth.³⁸ Further repairs on the steeple occurred in 1475, 1551, and 1574. After 1571, Saint Michael bordered the newly established Royal Exchange. Ten of its parishioners were listed among “the principal inhabitants of Cornhill Ward in 1640.”³⁹

The economic well-being produced both benefits and problems for the parishioners. When the government of Edward VI debased the coinage of the realm, the churchwardens acknowledged the change in the amount of the shilling and faced the resulting economic ramifications as did other London parishes, but they were in a stronger position to do so. Similarly, the Elizabethan parish missed much of the trauma of the rapid growth in population that occurred throughout London, adding about 6 percent (844 to 898) to its population.⁴⁰ Roger Finlay calculated that between 1580 and 1640, the parish registers recorded 2,234 baptisms versus 2,323 burials, which created a negative birth rate, meaning that migration occurred, but a migration that may not have overwhelmed the settled community as so many Elizabethan Londoners constantly feared.⁴¹ Still, the population grew by ca. 6 percent, which under-represents the migration of new people into the parish in the last decades of the sixteenth century, a period when all London parishes were dealing with larger numbers of the poor and indigent.

Through it all, this parish maintained a dedicated social elite, which aided in the maintenance of a more unified parish. Beginning in the fifteenth century, William Dillowe served as churchwarden in 1458. In 1459, he paid 6 s. 8 d. for the burial of his daughter, and in 1460 it was noted that money he had borrowed (as churchwarden?), 12 s. 6 d., was repaid. In 1469, Dillowe was among the ca. ten parish representatives who “assented, agreed, accorded and enacted” guidelines for the parish audit. Dillowe’s final appearance in the parish records occurred in 1474, when the parish recorded 10 s. for his burial.⁴² Also in the fifteenth-century accounts, three names appear in the accounts: John Pake (or Pace) “the Midler,” or middle son, was listed as the third churchwarden in 1462; John Pake the younger was buried in 1464; and John Pake the elder served as churchwarden in 1467–69.⁴³ The Pake family mattered in the parish during the 1460s, and John Pake the elder was one of the parish men to witness a set of rules created for the parish in 1480, along with Robert Drope, William Shukburgh (1475 churchwarden), William Capell, draper, (1474 churchwarden), Peirce Clement, draper, (1465 churchwarden), and others such as John Hungerford. Hungerford served as churchwarden in 1456, 1457, 1465, and witnessed with William Dillowe the above-mentioned memorandum of 1469; he was probably a draper since he served as executor for the estates of Thomas Hosyer, draper, and Thomas Elys, draper; he even paid for the burial of Elys’s son.⁴⁴

The churchwardens left no indication of dealing with a women’s guild, and parish fraternities receive mention only in wills and in one surviving parish memorandum. The parish did have a special benefactor in the remarkable Jane (Jehane) Norton, who, as a widow, married Robert Drope, a draper, alderman, and Lord Mayor of London (1474–75), and then, after Drope’s death, went on to marry Edward Grey, Viscount Lisle.⁴⁵ Lady Lisle, as she was known for the last decade or so of her life, certainly stood apart from the rest of the parish. As Jane Drope, she and Robert were a wealthy couple who owned several tenements in the parish. For mass, they sat apart, of course, Robert with the men and Jane with the women, but their status placed them in the front pews, before the Chapel of Our Lady and the Chapel of Saint Katherine. But throughout the late fifteenth century, they engaged in a great deal of parish-based philanthropy, as will be discussed at several points in this chapter.

Peter Cave, draper, lived in and ran his business from the parish, taking in John Bird as an apprentice on 29 September 1523. Cave died a year prior to the end of the twelve-year apprenticeship, in 1534, and Bird left London for a while, but returned and was admitted to the Drapers’ Company in 1552.⁴⁶ On 17 January 1546, Thomas Chappell married Alyce Bedle; on 28 February 1551, the parish christened a boy named Thomas Chappel [sic]; and, on 28 April 1558, “Mr Thomas Chappell” was buried.⁴⁷

Aldermen Thomas Lodge served as churchwarden in 1548. In 1550, he purchased “coops & vestments” from the parish for £15 13 s. Also in 1550, he signed a deed with the parish that allowed him to move into a newly constructed chamber that had been built in the churchyard; therefore, he appears in the churchwardens’ accounts for 1554, 1555, and 1556 paying rent. In 1554, “Master Alderman Lodge” negotiated a price for the repair of the church’s organ. He buried a child in 1556, a son also named Thomas, who was buried on 4 June.⁴⁸

George Hynde was also a churchwarden in 1548. In 1550, he bought some of the parish’s copes and vestments for £4 12 d. In 1550, a series of entries indicate that Hynde and the parish were involved in the purchase of lead for the church porch and the vestry; the parish paid 34 s. 8 d. for the cost of the lead and its conveyance.⁴⁹ He also donated two “grete dores from the water syde.” Hynde was the first name on the list of auditors for the 1550 accounts. He served as a churchwarden again in 1552, but he died before his year was over—his name appears in the parish register as being buried on 6 August 1552.⁵⁰ In 1554, the parish paid 5 s. to a scrivener to write out the 1552 accounts of George Hynde, suggesting those records should be approached with some skepticism. Still, the parish maintained a core of such significant individuals, many of them drapers, who spent years working to bring order and stability to the parish throughout the Tudor era.

As seen in Chapter 1, churchwardens’ accounts not only inform about the income and expenditures of the parish, but they also function to legitimate status. That function is less visible in the records from Saint Michael Cornhill, because wealth and status were more established and institutionally defined in this wealthier, central London parish. There are no ordered lists of donors for specific projects, the Dropes simply mattered, and those who mattered less fade into invisibility. This parish possessed parishioners with generally more wealth and higher status, and, as a result, there was less social strategizing projected into the accounts. Drapers appear throughout, which suggests another way that the presence of the company mattered even if individual members of the company came and went.

Individual women appear here and there, paying rent, or burying a family member, or having their pew repaired, but they do not function in the records as did their counterparts at Allhallows London Wall. In 1473, the parish paid 8 d. to the clerks of “my Ladye Bokynghm” for singing, but that is the only appearance of Lady Buckingham in the accounts—and the entry was not about her, but brought the prestige of her status into the moment.⁵¹ The absence of recorded activity by the goodwives of the parish is an attribute of the nature of the record-keeping tradition in Saint Michael’s parish. By rendering the women of the parish less visible, and the guilds invisible, the churchwardens’ accounts emphasize the actions of a more cohesive—and male—core group, many of them drapers. The work of that elite group was occasionally augmented by a cleric, city officials, or an exceptional woman, such as Lady Lisle.⁵²

The saints

Saintly images filled the pre-Reformation London churches. They glittered with gold, silver, and an assortment of colors, and were decorated with birds, flowers, trees, crowns, rings—all illuminated by candlelight. Parishioners frequently funded those lights. The saints offered intercessory prayers, but as the debates of the Reformation developed, reformers charged idolatry. In England, the move against saints’ images occurred over a ca. twelve-year period, as the Injunctions of 1536, 1538, and 1547 called for, at first, the removal of abused images and then a prohibition on the veneration of those that remained.⁵³ Between 1541 and 1543, feast days in observance of non-biblical saints who were also not mentioned in a text by a church father, were revoked.⁵⁴ The Royal Council ordered the eradication of all images in January 1548.⁵⁵ What the parishioners thought of these orders is unknown, but this moment of iconoclasm begins a series of transitions targeting the architecture of the local church as physical space that needed to conform to reformed theological requirements. The action also transformed the method by which many parishioners interacted with each other.

Numerous wills provide clues as to the saints honored at Saint Michael Cornhill, beginning with religious fraternities—which usually connected to a particular altar or image. Thomas Lyffyn, draper, (1491), left money to the fraternity of Saint Anne in exchange for the entry of four names, including Dame Margaret Alley, into the fraternity’s prayer roll.⁵⁶ In 1500, Symond Stephanson’s will mentions two fraternities, Our Lady and Saint Anne, and Saint George and Saint Christopher.⁵⁷ Four years later, in 1504, Alice Hongreforth, widow, left bequests to the parish fraternities of Saint Michael and Our Lady, and of Saint Anne and Saint George, made numerous donations to the poor of Cornhill, and left personal items to specific people, including “cups with images of S[t]. James in the bottom” to one Elizabeth Green.⁵⁸ The 1525 will of William Neele mentions the fraternity of Saint George and Saint Christopher, and also that of Saint Nicholas and Saint Katherine.⁵⁹ There were, in fact, numerous fraternities available to the parishioners (at some moment in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries) dedicated to Jesus, Saint Mary, Saint Anne;⁶⁰ Saint Christopher; Saint Michael;⁶¹ and fraternities of Saint Christopher and Saint George, Our Lord and Our Lady, Saint Michael and Our Blessed Lady, Saint Anne and Saint George, and Saint Anne and Our Blessed Lady.⁶² These associations were dissolved in 1548 by the Chantries Act (1 Ed VI c.14), but the government’s reform of the role of saints in the church was already transforming the guilds by then.⁶³

The most prominent saints honored within the parish church were the Archangel Michael (church dedication, statue on steeple, altar, and an image associated with Saint George in the church), the Virgin Mary (chapel, rood, images and pietà, altars, fraternity), Saint Katherine (chapel, image, altar), Saint Anne (altar, image, fraternity), Saint Margaret (altar), Saint Barbara (image), John the Baptist (images, rood), and Saint George (image and fraternity).⁶⁴ There was a cloth hanging that depicted the Transfiguration.⁶⁵ The rood loft possessed the traditional images (or statutes) of Mary and John.⁶⁶ The Edwardian Inventory of 1552 adds further evidence of saintly devotion, including a gilded image of Mary and an angel, and vestments for the boy bishop celebrations of Saint Nicholas Day.⁶⁷ Cloth banners and altar cloths would have presented other saints and images associated with liturgical feasts, but, in general, these main saints represented devotions fairly typical in late medieval parish pieties.

By the early Tudor period, both the Virgin Mary and Saint George had developed roles as national saints for the kingdom and created an association between two intercessors who protected souls and would be present at the final judgment.⁶⁸ The association of Saint Michael and Saint George united two militaristic, knightly saints who battled evil, especially demonic influences plaguing the faithful, but besides being that of a dragon-slayer, St George’s cult could emphasize healing and fertility, although his championing of Christendom was most important in England.⁶⁹ Saint Anne, the mother of Mary, tended to be represented in plays and devotional texts in East Anglia as a wealthy urban widow, and sometimes as a pious merchant’s wife, which perfectly suited a population such as the one that lived in Cornhill Ward and undoubtedly found similar expressions within the city.⁷⁰

Helper saints—Saint Christopher, Saint Margaret, Saint Katherine, and Saint Barbara—assisted people with numerous dangerous and life-threatening conditions, and they were also traditional saints of the medieval era.⁷¹ Saint Christopher was the patron saint of travelers, but popular belief maintained that to look upon his image was to be spared death for that day; consequently, most churches exhibited his image.⁷² Saint Barbara also protected the faithful from sudden death, especially from “lightning, gun powder, fire-arms…and she was the patron saint of artilleryman, architects, masons, quarrymen and miners.”⁷³ Saint Katherine was often depicted with a breaking wheel of fortune, demonstrating the transitory nature of good or bad fortune, and was also the patron saint of all who worked with wheels: “wheelwrights, potters, and spinners,” but also “teachers, lawyers and priests.”⁷⁴ Saint Margaret protected women in childbirth. She was frequently represented with a dragon or demon since her vita relates her torture and subsequent battle with demons that appeared in her cell.⁷⁵ While these numerous saints would have appealed to a wide variety of parishioners in the early Tudor era, they were generally popular in the city; in other words, there is little to find surprising in this group.⁷⁶

Evidence regarding who selected these saints’ images is mostly lacking, but Lady Lisle provided the necessary direction for renovating the rood screen and placing saints’ images upon it.⁷⁷ There may have been a more collaborative approach to selecting which saints would appear on the screen, but the records emphasize only her role without specifying the saints.⁷⁸ These images were to be the final rood saints for the parish, lasting until the removal of all such images, about a decade prior to the destruction of the rood screen in 1559.⁷⁹

The parish’s saints afforded numerous points of spiritual connection between parishioners and the sacred through the narratives featured within the vitae of these saints, but evidence provides little information concerning particular examples. A general framework, however, may be delineated. Hagiography did not remain static in the Middle Ages, so the saints transformed to fit changing social needs. Parishes could emphasize or de-emphasize different aspects of a saint’s vita and the post-plague period was especially active in this regard.⁸⁰ Saint George may have once assisted with rainmaking, an attribute forgotten as the English emphasized his dragon-slaying abilities as a symbol of good over evil.⁸¹

The popularity of saints may be judged by their ubiquitous and innumerable representations. The local leaders usually shaped the visual representation of the sacred for those in the pews, creating an approach to the sacred that was multi-layered, multi-vocal, and varied. Yet the saints disappeared from the churches quickly. This moment of iconoclasm begins a series of transitions targeting the architecture of the church, since physical space needed to conform to theological requirements. The removal of the saints’ images was a significant and visible aspect of the Henrician and Edwardian Reformations.

A final comment concerns the parish’s patron saint, Saint Michael the Archangel, who was, in fact, not a saint, but an angel, and mentioned in the Bible. Therefore, the Reformers had to deal with him differently than with a Saint George or a Saint Margaret. Michael’s statue stood on top of the church’s steeple at the end of the fifteenth century as mentioned in two entries from the churchwardens’ accounts: “for lyfyng up the Mighell in the stelpe” [1470];⁸² and “ffor gylding of y^e fane of y^e Stepull a Sent Mychell pōn” [1475].⁸³ Michael represented a powerful intercessor, a guardian spirit and he traveled between heaven and earth to teach appropriate behavior (Figure 2.2).⁸⁴ He was redefined as an example of God’s divinely established order, as explained in the Collect for 21 September from the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.⁸⁵ Angels could still protect humans in Protestant England, but as God directed and without reference to a human prayer or request. On the accession of Edward VI, the statue had been removed and Michael transitioned into different kind of symbol of the parish. In 1569, as a part of registering parish property, they gave a silver cup engraved with an image of Saint Michael worth about £7 to the Drapers’ Company.⁸⁶ Such saintly images decorated numerous medieval cups, but in the case of this Elizabethan-era one, while it might possess a nostalgic connotation, Michael simply represented the company’s ties to the parish.

Figure 2.2 Drawing of tower with steeple of Saint Michael Cornhill

Source: MS04071/001, fo. 196r

Monuments and memorials

Throughout the Middle Ages, many Londoners had either left money for the construction of tombs and memorials in their parish church, or else their families arranged for them to be built. Medieval memorials presented the names and sometimes images of the deceased, or symbols of their families, or of their status or occupations, and frequently included inscriptions that requested prayers.⁸⁷ They invited viewers to participate in a tripartite religious performance that was partly historical, partly theological, and partly contemporary. These monuments were always subject to being moved or removed if church building projects so required, but the reign of Edward VI witnessed a large removal of monuments and brasses from London’s churches because their religious messages acknowledged the teaching of purgatory.⁸⁸ Such policy produced a significant impact on all of the city’s churches and brought changes to a building and its surroundings that not only altered aesthetics, but influenced emotional and psychological responses as well.⁸⁹ Even the newly arriving parishioners could begin to develop feelings of connection to the place, while they continued to identify with a previous home parish.⁹⁰

Indicators such as church architecture, bequests, and expenditures of time and effort suggest a concentrated focus and are documented in the churchwardens’ accounts, while parish activities concerning the dead appear scattered across different kinds of records. Prior to 1530, the theology of purgatory mattered tremendously in the parish.⁹¹ This fact corresponds with a larger pattern and, as Eamon Duffy has written, the theology of purgatory “was the single most influential factor in shaping both the organization of the Church and the physical layout and appearance of the buildings in which men and women worshipped.”⁹² Clues concerning the personalities of testators may be found woven within many of the arrangements establishing mortuary endowments and on their monuments as well.

Mortuary endowments of various sorts frequently filled London’s pre-Reformation churches with prayers and chants; bede rolls contained lists of deceased parishioners and those names were read annually along with prayers.⁹³ These liturgical practices promoted a collective memory by keeping memories of the departed with the community—and it all functioned as an aspect of forming a group identity.⁹⁴ Location mattered in the establishment of memorials and other mnemonic devices.⁹⁵ Saint Michael was no exception; both direct and indirect evidence indicate a church with a rich and varied assortment of mortuary endowments and a few splendid tombs, but we know only a small part of the details.

Robert and Jane Drope’s tomb was built near the Lady chapel, probably by the location of Robert’s pew, near the Sepulchre on the north side of the choir.⁹⁶ They endowed a perpetual chantry for the benefit of their souls and for the souls of Robert’s parents, left money to numerous charitable institutions, and arranged for a mass on Saint Ursula’s day.⁹⁷ Robert’s will also arranged for his and all other souls to be prayed for from the pulpit each Sunday for a year; he was buried in their “fayre Tombe of Grey Marble” in the fall of 1485.⁹⁸ Upon her death in 1500, Jane Lady Lisle bequeathed £90 to the church for its beautification and was also laid to rest in the Drope tomb.⁹⁹ She established a perpetual obit through rents totaling £8 13 s. 4 d. per annum.

In making their philanthropic requests, the Dropes projected specific characteristics into their prayer requests and memorial—and more implicitly with the beautification of the church, in choosing saints for veneration—sending a series of messages about their identities for future parishioners. This is what monuments did, in the period before the changes of 1530–59. Even after the Reformation, monuments, in general, “have one primary task,” in the words of Peter Sherlock, “to attract visitors and make them remember the dead.”¹⁰⁰ The Drope’s tomb of gray marble did all of that. They could build such a tomb because they possessed the wealth, status, and power to emphasize their choices and continue to assert their privileged place in parish culture. The path to empowerment rested on these socio-economic factors and helped to prioritize the desires of the Dropes in the early Tudor parish just as lack of wealth, status, and power marginalized others.

Memorials and mortuary endowments represented an intersection of ideas, actions, memories, and objects. Objects could shape identities, fashion legacies, and promote beliefs long after the death of the patron. Such objects operated as mnemonic devices that anchored memories and allowed the wealthier sort an advantage in framing the parish heritage and faith. Ian Archer has referred to parish churches and company halls “as theatres of memory in which the elite constantly recalled the charitable acts of previous members of the ruling group, as a spur to further charitable endeavour, and also in the process legitimating…a set of unequal power relations.”¹⁰¹ The monuments, tombs, and memorials within parish churches anchored a skewed social history of the parish, a phenomenon that occurred in all parish churches to some degree and that continued to keep privileged parishioners in place of honor.¹⁰²

Memorials and mortuary endowments offered an alternative source of documentation to the churchwardens’ accounts, most obviously in documenting those who had once mattered in the parish and offering some social empowerment to those who might still have descendants among the parishioners.¹⁰³ There could have been memorials dating back centuries, given historical burial patterns.¹⁰⁴ Unfortunately, between the iconoclasm of the mid-sixteenth century and the Great Fire of 1666, few survive for Saint Michael Cornhill. A set of rules for the parish, dated 1480, required the priests and clerks to pray for the benefactors of the parish and the soul of Richard Atsold, “sometyme p[ar]son of this church” to be sung at matins to the honor of God and Saint Michael, “begynnyng in the yere of oure Lord 1375: A^o E:3:48.”¹⁰⁵ This requirement was not on a bede roll, but represents the establishment of a prayer request, but Atsold’s remembrance further demonstrate the influence of status in the memorializing of the dead.

Numerous prayers for the dead could occur without association with a monument or chantry, of course. Adam Smythe left rents worth £12 per annum to support a priest and an obit. Simon Mordonne’s endowment for a chaplain and obit was worth £9 annually. Most parishioners would have heard a church bell peal to mark those obits and might possibly have known something about the person being remembered. Many perpetual chantries came with some more elaborate structure, and even if the specifics are not delineated in the sources, some sort of tomb was probably involved. The Corporation of London maintained a chaplain at Saint Michael Cornhill in satisfaction of the will of John Leche, but this arrangement bypassed the churchwardens.¹⁰⁶ William Rus left rents totaling £27 13 s. 4 d. p.a. to support a priest and charitable distribution of coal to the poor, and the records imply that he had a tomb in the Lady chapel. The fraternities, of course, would have prayed for the souls of their former members, probably at the altars that corresponded to their patron saints.

The pre-Reformation parish had responsibility for complex mortuary/property arrangements. In 1517, the will of William Capell, draper, knight, alderman, and active leader in the early Tudor parish (1474 churchwarden and witness to 1480 memorandum), “devised” the house that had once belonged to Viscountess Lisle to the parson and the churchwardens for pious purposes. To be remembered with the endowment of this gift were the late Viscount and Viscountess Lisle, Robert Drope and her previous husbands. From the rent of the tenement, 13 s. 4 d. would be used to repair and gild the sepulcher, which had been erected by Robert Drope, “and also of the crucifix with Mary and John and the other works which the Viscountess had caused to be made upon the rood loft.”¹⁰⁷ Numerous directives faced the churchwardens of the early Tudor period as testators sought to maintain prayers for their souls and parish care for their concerns.¹⁰⁸ The complex nexus of mortuary endowments, death rituals, interments, and other such legacies must have permeated the parish culture at Saint Michael Cornhill, occupying the concerns of the churchwardens along with rent collections, property maintenance, and overseeing mortuary endowments.

Besides the Drope tomb, which was demolished in mid-century, memorials for John Stow’s grandfather and father—both named Thomas Stow—existed in the church and both survived into the 1590s. Records document the memorials for three former aldermen: William Rus (Russe), (1434); Robert Fabian (1511); and Peter Hawton (1596) also within the Tudor-era church, but little else is known regarding memorials.¹⁰⁹ Rus, goldsmith and sheriff, was buried in the Lady chapel, and his will bequeathed bread to all of the chaplains of the parish. For years the parish possessed “Rus’ chest,” in which chantry money was stored, secured by four locks. His arms were still displayed in the windows in the late 1590s.¹¹⁰ Fabian, a draper, who had published a chronicle on the history of England and France, was interred in a tomb with a few lines engraved upon it echoing the ephemeral nature of what appears to be permanent.¹¹¹ Hawton was interred at the site of the destroyed Drope tomb, but there is no detail concerning his memorial except that the construction of his tomb suggests that the destruction of the earlier Drope tomb probably resulted from theological motivations.

The Edwardian-era destruction of tombs aimed to eliminate theologically prohibited messages or saints’ images and to reclaim space.¹¹² Royal and aristocratic tombs might survive, but not those of merchants unless any reference to purgatory could be easily obliterated. In general, the iconoclasm broke the community from various symbols and texts, expressed in the vernacular of the old faith, which represented former benefactors and, thus, helped to establish an authority for the mortuary practices of the medieval church. Stow’s discussion of those memorials, both destroyed and preserved, ultimately engaged with a contested history, with both individual and collective memories, and with the transformation of local history necessitated by Tudor Reformation policies.

In the post-Reformation era, monuments might make a statement of Reformed concepts of salvation, or not, while some information about the departed—their identity, family, profession, and status—most certainly remained. At the church of Saint Helen Bishopsgate, one of the few churches to survive the Great Fire, an Elizabethan-era inscription for Tohn [sic] Robinson, merchant-tailor, and wife, Christian, showed the couple and their children “being placed, according to sex, on each side of an altar-table,” with the following inscription: “Heaven (no doubt) hath theire soules, and this howse of stones theire bodyes, where they sleepe in peace, till the sōmons of a glourious resurrection wakens them.”¹¹³

Unfortunately, given the destruction of Saint Michael Cornhill in 1666, it is difficult to know the exact number of tombs contained within the church, but, as will be shown, many Elizabethan-era parishioners made bequests for sermon and philanthropic endeavors. The will of Richard Stapleton (1591) asked the executor to arrange burial wherever is most convenient; a memorial, if there was one, would have been decided by the executor or by one of Stapleton’s friends or family.¹¹⁴

The churchwardens’ accounts are filled with burials, and numerous wills contain bequests, most of which do not contain details of monuments, but still created liturgically influenced messages that would shape memories for years to come. For example, the will of Thomas Ely (1465) requested burial next to his wife and left torches to burn before the high altar of the church, and others to the fraternities of Our Lady, Saint Michael, and St Christopher, for remembrance in their prayers.¹¹⁵ Without any more information, all that is left is guesswork, but Mary and Michael would be present at the Last Judgment, and Christopher assisted people making journeys; it seems an obvious message in the pre-Reformation church with a statue of Saint Michael of the steeple. For a Reformed national church to emerge and flourish, the space within the parish church had to be reclaimed from the generations of traditional believers and shaped into something new. Thus, there occurred the destruction of memorials, followed by the gradual acquisition of new memorials with politically acceptable messages.

Parish sales

And then the parish sold most of its fabric, plate, and ornaments early in the reign of Edward VI. The motivation behind this action is difficult to explain, but religious sentiment does not present a convincing answer. The parish was not a site of early reformed teachings, and the vicar, Rowland Phillips, was a supporter of the validity of the marriage of Catherine of Aragon, a position that landed him in the Tower by 1532.¹¹⁶ Parishioner Richard Downes, clothworker, has been identified as “a typically moderate, quasi-Lutheran evangelical,” and his will (December 1542) expressed support for the doctrine of justification by faith, but also requested “a wax taper to burn before the sacrament at Saint Michael Cornhill for tithes forgotten.”¹¹⁷ But this material fails to provide evidence of an emerging evangelical religious culture.

The Edwardian parish existed in a different legal, social, economic, and religious milieu from that of the fifteenth-century parish, or even from a mere twenty-five years earlier, making comparisons difficult. Still, financial distress does not quite explain the sales either, without some additional goal. The extant 1551 accounts report £80 annual income, vastly more than the fifteenth-century incomes, but given the passage of time and the currency debasements of 1543–46 and 1549–50, comparisons become impossible.¹¹⁸ Economically resilient, the parish built the twenty-four chambers in its cloistered churchyard to lease for income. Parish officials gave children figs in 1549 when they took possession of new houses, perhaps as a gesture of goodwill as they moved to establish finances on the more solid ground of property and rental income.¹¹⁹ The 1559 receipts identify sections (1) of new rents, then (2) of the rents from the chambers in the cloister, and (3) of burials with pewage fees. The total of receipts amounts to £45 13 s. 4 d. In the later Tudor period, the parish’s revenues largely originated from rent, but given the lack of a full accounting from the earlier period, it is impossible to know how fundraising at Saint Michael Cornhill parish truly changed over time.

The survival of multiple accounts for several years during the most turbulent years of the Reformation—1548–60—allows more confidence regarding an analysis of the parish’s activities, much of it ordered by the government, and this financial information provides context for the sale of parish goods.¹²⁰ In 1548, the parish paid to observe obits and to maintain the beam light on the rood screen, and they also purchased seven psalters in English.¹²¹ They sold old latten and brass objects, such as candlesticks, for £4 6 s. ¹²² In August, the churchwardens and “other of the Masters of the p[a]rishe” negotiated a complicated sale of church plate to a goldsmith named Thomas Mustian, which included a gilded statue of Mary with an angel, a cross with Mary and John the Baptist (which may have been the rood cross), and a great many other such objects worth over £85.¹²³ Also in 1548, the wardens paid a plasterer for whitening the church and the library and then paid a mason “for cuttynge downe the stownes y^t y^e ymagys stowd upon in y^e churche.”¹²⁴ They also paid the clerk at Saint Bride’s for copies of crests (royal arms?) to be placed around the church.¹²⁵ The parish purchased new song books and paid a schoolmaster at Saint Paul’s school “for wrytyng of the masse in Englysh & ye benedicities,” which undoubtedly refers to Cranmer’s Order for Communion, 1548, which provided both the bread and the wine to communicants.¹²⁶

In 1549, the parish purchased four psalters and a copy of the new prayer book. The wardens paid 4 s. to a mason to take down the church’s six side and chapel altars.¹²⁷ Also in 1549, a lengthy list appears describing the sale of church vestments: a blue cope with ravens, a cope of red cloth of gold, a red vestment with black crosses and stars, an altar cloth of purple velvet and cloth of gold, a canopy of red silk, and many more.¹²⁸ As large as this sale appears to have been, the churchwardens’ accounts leave no indication of how much remained with the parish, but the 1552 inventory shows that the parish possessed items appropriate for a reformed service: communion cups, a carpet for a communion table of white damask with birds, pulpit cloth, and so on—but the parish still maintained some altar cloths.¹²⁹ The architecture, ornaments, and fabrics connected to the older theater of memory and the celebration of the mass had been removed, and the space re-ordered with different symbols such as the Decalogue and, perhaps, the king’s coat of arms, with items appropriate for a communion service.

Why the parish leaders sold such items in 1547–48 is perplexing, but changes in the relationship to liturgical items probably indicates a transformation in how the significant parishioners understood their duty to maintain such items and the economic and political needs of the parish. Similar lists of sold vestments—identifying color, decoration, material, and sometimes the name of the original donor and purchaser—can be found in churchwardens’ accounts from across London. Saint Mary Colechurch sold items for £13 9 s. 6 d., while Saint Stephen Walbrook recorded a staggering £132 11s. 10d. ¹³⁰ Between 1548 and 1550, Allhallows Staining sold a chalice, paxes, the tabernacle, censors, copes, the “latten books,” an old passion cloth, and a canopy cloth in 1549.¹³¹ At Saint Margaret Moses, the 1549–50 accounts introduce the sale of church items with an appeal for urgently needed building repairs:

Hereafter followeth divers parcels of plate sold by the assent and consent of the parson of our church and /^most part of all credible persons of the parish as it doth appear by a bill where unto the same set their hands for divers and needful urgent causes for the repairing and amending of our church.¹³²

As Gordon Huelin has observed, the scribe inserted the word “most” as an afterthought, which creates an interesting double modification in a phrase that meant, essentially, the majority of those who count. The ornaments and vestments represented another discarding of items that served to remind parishioners of previous benefactors and former devotions. Items that had been in the possession of the parish for years were tossed out, while the newly acquired communion cup and table coverings might have inspired sentimental meaning for some, but surely not all.

The motivation behind the 1548–49 sales remains a curiosity. No legal requirement demanded the disposal of these items at the time of the sale, although numerous legal changes had most certainly rendered many of the items unusable and the Privy Council had shown an interest in such parish wealth beginning in 1547.¹³³ From one perspective, the parish leaders were simply putting on the market superfluous items that could no longer be employed in the liturgy and that could be purchased by anybody who desired them for whatever reasons. From another perspective, given the government’s confiscations of endowments for chantries and fraternities, the inspiration may have been to protect economic assets.¹³⁴ The passage from Saint Margaret Moses parish, cited above, demonstrates the tactic of selling objects to use the money to fund church projects, perhaps even those required by the government.¹³⁵ Yet even if the transfer of wealth was motivated by economic necessity, historians have debated religious sentiment. Eamon Duffy recognizes that evangelical teaching provided some motivation for the sales, but he cautions that “the Edwardine regime found it far easier to enforce the removal of images and altars than to make wardens equip churches for the new worship, by the purchase of Bibles, service-books and the Paraphrases of Erasmus.”¹³⁶ Susan Brigden uses the term iconoclasm—as opposed to the evangelical actions that appear elsewhere in the same chapter—in her discussion of the sales after discussing the push to define images as idols and remove them from churches such as Saint Martin Ironmonger Lane, the first parish to transform its worship space.¹³⁷ Lastly, it appears that once the move to sell ornaments and vestments began, the social pressure to join in helped to spread the action across the city.¹³⁸

Rather than seek a religious motivation, it might prove more profitable to stay with symbolic and economic analyses. Given that there had been grumblings and uprisings against Tudor policies since 1536 (and there would be more uprisings in 1549), the selling of parish plate, fabric, and ornaments might be seen as the merging of two strategies: (1) as previously stated, it was the transferring of funds to protect parish wealth from potential confiscation; and yet (2) it was also an acquiescence and acceptance of the changes that had already occurred and a recognition of the manner in which the government had proceeded in ecclesiastical affairs. Their actions recognized that the former way of celebrating the mass was gone. By selling their old mass instruments, the parish leaders acknowledged the change, but not a forfeiture of their wealth.¹³⁹ The sale by London’s merchants was the London rebellion (or, perhaps, the London resistance); they viewed the items as wealth that could be transferred and that is what they did, but otherwise, they agreed to comply. After defeating the rebellion of 1549, the government turned its attention to the issue. A major purpose of the Edwardian inventories of 1552 originated in the government’s desire to reconstruct who had profited from those sales. The death of the king in July 1553 rendered the exercise a moot point, but Mary’s government also wished to know where these items had gone, and that desire has always been interpreted as simply part of the restoration of Catholic worship. Mary’s government, like Edward’s, did not appreciate parish masters behaving in this fashion.

As the churchwardens removed various texts and objects that anchored the community to aspects of the old faith, and of its memories and history, they also acquired new items. Parishioners would have to develop new memories and new emotional attachments to the items required in the reformed church, but that would take time. Even so, in this crucial period of the mid-Tudor century, some parish actions may have exhibited decisions that resulted from compromises or expressed a mixture of beliefs. For example, in 1554, while overseeing the making of the Easter sepulcher, the churchwardens had a cloth with the Ten Commandments and some other phrases of Scripture set up in the belfry, “at the requeste of Mr. Guntter and other[s].”¹⁴⁰ Also, the altar stone which had been removed from the high altar in 1549–50 was placed in the cloistered churchyard and it remained there for eight years until it was brought back into the church in 1555.¹⁴¹ “Paide to the porters of the Wayhouse for bringeinge in the Aulter stone oute of the Cloyster and laying it on the Aulter in Master Aldremas Chapple” 2 s. They also paid 3 s. “to pave where the Aulter stone laye.”¹⁴² If we assume that parishioners were dividing into sectarian camps, then compromise becomes a possible explanation for such actions. However, what if parishioners could express multiple theological positions? The will of William Risse (written Feb 1552 [1553], probated Sept 1553) left money to Risse’s apprentice, Edward, and goddaughter, Christabol, to pray for him and requested six sermons to be preached at Saint Michael.¹⁴³ An incremental process in transforming the church might have included small compromises, certainly provided time for people to adjust to changes, and occurred with everyone aware of the danger of potential social discord.

The sale of the church items became a foundational event in the transformation more as the acknowledgment of their archaic nature than as a statement of parish theology, but it influenced parish memories too. The selling of the traditional vestments and devotional items related to the old faith dislocated the community from objects that had been bought or donated by their predecessors and that were connected to the faith of the previous centuries, something that even the Marian restoration could not undo, and in the new era that would emerge after 1559, the parish possessed only a small fragment of the number of such items it held prior to 1530. Therefore, the focus of parish sentiment, worship, and memory would never function in quite the same fashion again. However Elizabethan parishioners might recall the Edwardian sales, they had more immediate, and therefore more important concerns to deal with. Crucial to the transition of 1548–1553, and later, post-1559, was the growing focus on poor relief.

The pathway through the mid-century is well known. After conforming to the Henrician Reformation, and to the Edwardian Reformation, the parish conformed to the policies of Mary I. The accounts of 1553–55 present all the evidence of that conformity without explicit indication of local debates. The accounts from All Saints Day 1553 to All Saints Day 1554 contain the re-installation of the high altar, purchases of an aspergill, censor, pax, altar cloths, priests for special services, singing bread, sepulcher candles, Pascal candles, and “tenebar candles.”¹⁴⁴ They removed the new pews in the chancel that had been set with their backs to the location of the high altar.¹⁴⁵ The parish rang bells and celebrated with singing and a Te Deum on 7 February 1554 to celebrate the capture of Thomas Wyatt.¹⁴⁶ They whited the church again and painted both chapels red and black.¹⁴⁷ But most of the old items were gone forever, and there was a newness to the masses of 1554, but the accounts demonstrate consistent support for the ecclesiastical policies of Mary I and the requisite maintenance of a traditional worship space and of those items required for the Catholic liturgical year.

Moving into the Elizabethan era, changes to the church occur once again; the high altar and side altars depart, a communion table appears, an image of Saint Michael is removed, and the church’s architecture transforms as the rood screen is removed and the pews situated in the chancel are “mended.”¹⁴⁸ The pattern of parish compliance continued into the reign of the last Tudor monarch, but the parish community was no longer operating as it had a mere twenty-five years earlier. The parish monuments, vestments, and objects jettisoned in the 1530s and 1540s represented decades, perhaps centuries of parishioners’ gifts and bequests, while the outward-bound items of 1559 were, mostly, five years old, with perhaps a few older, recovered items. Parish sentimental attachments could not have been the same. With the edifice of the church stripped of most of its traditional signs and symbols of the traditional sacraments, of community, of the monuments and memorials that connected the living with their predecessors, new symbols emerged.

Sermons and the age of the vestry

Sermons had developed an emphasis in the English Church during the early Tudor era and by the Elizabethan era they became one foundation of spiritual life, focused on the first and second book of homilies that congregations heard from the pulpit, or sermons delivered by clerics granted license to write their own. A few parishes began to make provisions for sermons. In 1549, a lectureship, typically a vehicle for teaching and explaining reformed ideas, was established at Saint Michael.¹⁴⁹ In 1573, the parish purchased “Mr Calvin’s Injunctions”—probably the translation by Thomas Norton (1561).¹⁵⁰ In 1575, another lectureship was established, most probably by the vestry seeking to employ sermons to further religious instruction.¹⁵¹ The churchwardens paid a fine in 1587 for having allowed an unlicensed cleric to preach a sermon in the church.¹⁵²

As for the liturgy, the introduction of the prayer books (1549, 1552, and 1559), and the first experience of English common prayer must have provoked a spectrum of responses until people got used to it.¹⁵³ Officially, unity in the Elizabethan Church was based on the Act of Uniformity of 1559, which established two foundations: (1) use of the Book of Common Prayer and (2) recognition of the Queen as the Supreme Governess of the church.¹⁵⁴ Accordingly, in 1560–61, the parish bought the new edition of the Book of Common Prayer and paid 4 s. “to my Lo[rd] Bushops man for receiving the bill of the names of the strangers w^thin the Warde.”¹⁵⁵ A new kind of social scrutiny came with the reformed church and the new faith. Words mattered so much more than images in the Elizabethan world. It was a world of sermons, books, articles, injunctions, and texts. The church that had once been a space given so much meaning by ritual and image, by the sacraments of the medieval church, the theology of purgatory, and the intercession of saints had become a space for common prayer and the preaching of the Word.¹⁵⁶ And the loyalty to the crown manifested itself through prayers for the queen and, probably, visually, too, via the royal coat of arms that may have been displayed where saints once stood.¹⁵⁷

Parish records demonstrate a more formalized and documented exercise of authority by the parish vestry throughout the Elizabethan era. On 16 May 1563, a vestry endorsed the celebration of communion on the first Sunday of each month and for instruction of the children’s catechism to occur on the second Sunday.¹⁵⁸ By February 1568, the vestry established new procedures for their auditing of the churchwardens’ accounts.¹⁵⁹ And by 1571, the vestry was undoubtedly electing the churchwardens and the collectors of the poor rate.¹⁶⁰ In June 1572, the vestry requested that the churchwardens assess fines to people who sit out of their assigned places in the pews.¹⁶¹ Status continued to matter to such a degree that it is almost never addressed in the records, but it does become evident on occasion, such as at a vestry meeting in February 1583 that required the churchwardens to have stands constructed next to the women’s pews so that maidservants might have a place “to stand and kneel.”¹⁶² Besides the appearance of sermons, the extant records tell of two new themes that emerged at the end of the Tudor period: a more documented, dominant, and regular participation of the vestry in parish government and the increasing demands on the parish for poor relief.

Poor relief

Poor relief, while not always met with enthusiasm by parishioners, provided a strong social mechanism to connect inhabitants to the parish. In fact, it focused the attention of parishioners onto their parish, but it operated in a different fashion than did examples of parish philanthropy from a century earlier simply because there was so much more poor relief recorded and because it had a more bureaucratic organization. Meetings of the vestry decided appropriate policies, and, frequently, the poor lined up at their assigned place and time for assistance.

Parochial obligations in poor relief were shaped by tradition and by several parliamentary statutes passed in the last half of the Tudor era, with the most significant changes occurring in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign. Several distinctions were made at the time among the poor of the parish versus vagabonds, and the degree to which someone was perceived to be the cause of their own misfortune. The government’s main approach to the problem of vagabondage, the wandering poor, focused on the idea that they should return to their homes. Government policies, especially in London, where parishes already expended a great deal of time and resources to fulfill their obligations, could be draconian and involved whippings, brandings, and so on. Elizabethan Poor Laws required parishes to care for foundlings, orphans, and the children of indigent mothers who gave birth within their parish bounds. It is difficult to know whether there were concerted attempts by a large number of poor pregnant women to reach more prosperous locations, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it may indeed have been the case. After 1571, those parishes closest to the Royal Exchange frequently dealt with vagabonds, especially pregnant women who were nearing their time of childbirth. Further west, in 1598, the churchwardens at Saint John Zachary paid 43 s. 4 d. “to the poor that was removed from Goldsmiths’ Hall.”¹⁶³

The parishioners from Saint Michael Cornhill left abundant evidence demonstrating their largesse when faced with the requirements of poor relief. It was an approach to poverty that grew out of the traditional approach to philanthropy that assumed it was a Christian duty, and the parish was an appropriate institution to assist the poor. With the closing of the monastic houses, a part of the city’s philanthropic organization disappeared, further prioritizing the role of the parish.¹⁶⁴ Since the culture differentiated between the worthy poor (those who faced hardship because of infirmity or age) versus the unworthy poor (deemed most likely to be lazy) churchwardens and vestrymen acted accordingly to that assumption and frequently wrote it into the amounts in the parish records.¹⁶⁵ Poor relief in London’s parishes continued to define who belonged, how they belonged, and who did not. In 1568, at Saint Botolph without Bishopsgate, William Allen, alderman, established the delivery of bread to thirteen poor people of the parish “to their great content and relief.”¹⁶⁶ When Thomas Cotton, the parish clerk at Saint Christopher le Stocks, died in 1590, many parishioners donated money for his children.¹⁶⁷ At Allhallows Staining, Alice Howson first appears in the churchwarden’s accounts in 1595, paying rent for a parish property. As the years pass, her name in the records changes to “Mother Alice,” and then “Blind Alice,” and by the early Stuart period, the parish provided her with free lodging and the occasional monetary gift.¹⁶⁸ The Lord Mayor and Court of Alderman requested parochial collections as a means to assist with poor relief, and the records from Allhallows Staining not only made note of the request, but kept a record of the collections beginning in 1601.¹⁶⁹ London parishioners could always demonstrate great compassion to their neighbors, but that compassion stretched thin when faced with larger numbers of nameless indigent folk.

Philanthropy in many forms became a focus of the Elizabethan parish, and therefore of many churchwardens’ accounts of the era. Of course, the poor had always been with them, and Saint Michael had demonstrated a long tradition of aid and assistance to the poor. In 1521, John Milborn, draper and former Lord Mayor, made numerous bequests for poor assistance, including thirteen loaves of bread to thirteen poor men at Saint Michael Cornhill.¹⁷⁰ Thomas Wells’ will (1554) made several bequests and directed the repayment of debts, but then requested the executors to take the residue of his estate and to give it either to the poor or to other charities as they saw fit.¹⁷¹ The 1554 accounts contains entries for alms distributed to poor families living in the alleyways, in Birchen Lane, and in the churchyard four times a year.¹⁷² The 1562 accounts acknowledge more than £56 for the hospitals.¹⁷³ In 1570, a vestry authorized payment to “the wyffe of John Johnsson toward the keeping of a poore gyrl w^ch she doth keepe, towe pensse the week.”¹⁷⁴ In 1571, they granted a request by a woman to give her time to pay her rent.¹⁷⁵ In 1575, they paid 3 s. for a poor woman “broughte abed” in the alley.¹⁷⁶ In 1581, the vestry acknowledged receipt of a legacy of £3 6 s. 8 d. from the estate of John Turner, skinner, for relief of the poor. Nine years later, “Mr. Barber distributed bred to the poor” at the cost of 2 s., and the “poor of o^r prsh” were given 12 d. ¹⁷⁷ In 1594, the parish, as did many other parishes, organized local efforts to counter an outbreak of the plague; they painted red crosses on the doors of infected homes and hired poor older women to care for the ill, especially the children.¹⁷⁸

This pattern of change in poor relief has long been recognized in London historiography, and Susan Brigden has commented on the continuing spiritual efficacy many theologians placed in distributing money to the poor.¹⁷⁹ At Saint Michael Cornhill, the evidence indicates that parish philanthropy replaced the theology of purgatory as a focus of parish culture with the significant members of the parish providing leadership. Beginning in the 1570s, an account dedicated to poor relief appeared, with revenue based mostly on a patent established by one Richard Standley, which generated £12 annually, augmented by other “accounts” and sources, creating a total of almost £22. Distribution of parish alms to individuals such as Widdow Plummer and Mother Morgan appear in the expenditures section. In the entire set of churchwardens’ accounts from Saint Michael Cornhill, the largest concentration of women may be found here as recipients in these payouts of parish philanthropy.

Parishioners remained keenly aware of their ability to influence parish culture long after they had died. In fact, philanthropic bequests are a common attribute of late sixteenth-century wills, and Vanessa Harding has shown that, for London, charitable bequests connected to funerals increased over the Tudor period.¹⁸⁰ At Saint Michael Cornhill parish, in 1578, John Dodd, draper, bequeathed money to family members and the poor of the parish, and he also paid debts for several other people, while also requesting that a Mr. Crowley preach for him.¹⁸¹ In 1591, Joan Withers left money to the parson of Saint Michael for a sermon to be delivered at her funeral and made a gift to fund the distribution of bread among the poor of the parish.¹⁸² These sorts of requests are a fundamental part of parishioners’ continued desire to have a lasting impact on the parish, but the largesse also plays into their conception of the proper role of the parish in London’s society. The construction of the increasingly godly city parish in Elizabethan London was demonstrated by numerous actions: preaching of the Word, especially with the establishment of a lectureship in 1575; the maintenance of a proper worship space; the employment of the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer; and the distribution of alms to numerous parishioners, mostly elderly women. Philanthropy rendered to indigent women offered proof of the proper operation of the Elizabethan (and reformed) parish.

The parish records, legitimizing the status quo once again, made it all seem rather easy. John Lute, clothworker, requested burial within the church and made provision for the distribution of a cake and a bun of spice bread “to every householder, rich and poor, in the Ward of Cornhill” on the day of his burial (1587). Additionally, he funded thirty sermons to be preached in the two years after his death and left property to the Clothworkers’ Company requesting they maintain a sermon to be delivered annually on Saint Luke’s Day. Lastly, he made bequests of money and clothing to twelve poor members of the parish.¹⁸³ The philanthropy of John Lute ignored the problem of London’s wandering poor but demonstrated largesse for the poor of his parish and ward. His bequest was structured to aid the known and worthy poor.

In 1584, the parish paid 4 s. 2 d. for the burial of a poor man who “dyed in the pulpett.”¹⁸⁴ At the end of the century came an increase in the anonymous poor and the foundlings. In 1600, the churchwardens “[p]aid to a Beadell and a woman for finding out of the mother of a Childe lefte in the pishe … iiij s. vj d.”¹⁸⁵ A final section appended to the 1590s accounts deals with most of the parish’s payments for poor relief, recording how the churchwardens distributed money to the poor on certain days, such as Christmas Eve, Holy Saturday, All Hallows Tide and so on. Several poor parishioners received payouts, including Goodwife Holmes, Alice Mocking, Mr. Taylor, two unnamed indigent pregnant women (one “great with child,” and the other “brought to bed in the churchyard”), and an unnamed vagabond. The parish also paid for the maintenance of a three-month-old baby girl, sending payments to “John Bingth of Bensinge in Kent” for nursing care obviously provided by his wife or some other female relative. The churchwardens sent money for several items of clothing as well. The total sum of this poor relief amounted to £27 3 s. 5 d. ¹⁸⁶ Then there followed three additional entries, for Widow Cherry (8 s. 8 d.), Widow Thomas (17 s. 4 d), and “Margaret” (8 s. 8 d.). By the end of the Tudor period, the churchwardens’ accounts treat poor relief separately from other parish expenses and then make a distinction as to the kind of recipient. In fact, the accounts consistently imply a distinction between types of poor people: those more worthy and those less.

The transformation and the memories

Such was the changing social milieu of Saint Michael Cornhill in the Tudor period, and parish officials obediently responded to government demands for changes in religious practices. The church transformed from an architectural space for the medieval religious sacramental system and associated rituals to a parish that maintained a reformed worship space and that required revenue to help ameliorate the social problems of the late Tudor city. This overall pattern expressed a tremendous social, cultural, and religious transformation, but the parish leaders facilitated the change and maintained a remarkable degree of coherence. They also produced records that legitimated the exercise of their own authority, of social and economic privilege, records that demonstrated their ability to do all this difficult work.

The most remarkable feature of the historic records comes from comparing the churchwardens’ accounts from the fifteenth century with those from the later Elizabethan era, because it becomes clear just how much parish operations had transformed. Perhaps that was the real impact of the Reformation for the realm of social history. The sale of the advowson to the Drapers’ Company changed parish culture and society, further empowering an already significant group and helping to form a more cohesive parish elite. Saint Michael was much less dislocated by basic economic and demographic changes than were most London parishes, but the population growth caused angst nonetheless. Then, as ordered, Saint Michael began a series of transformations that removed physical objects from its church because those objects expressed or supported rejected theologies. The end of the cult of saints necessitated the removal of images, eradicating traditional venues of human interaction and support, of ways of envisioning and approaching the sacred, and a method by which the local community might have expressed their own historically based and locally defined emphasis on the divine. Numerous parish monuments and memorials were either defaced or removed from the church because they promoted the theology of purgatory, but their removal also represented an attack on the parish’s history and connections to departed benefactors. Finally, the removal of altars and the sale of vestments and other liturgical objects further divorced local sentiment from the performance of the liturgy, but also completed the deconstruction of the old parish, leaving a space for the construction of a royal and national church. The growing emphasis on institutionalized poor relief as a legal parish obligation carried with it a new emphasis in parish devotions and philanthropy in an increasingly Calvinist-oriented city. The parish records are institutional records and they demonstrate the transformation of the institution of the parish as legally required, but the change was, in reality, a series of long-term and short-term actions that moved Saint Michael Cornhill to a new world view. When the parish rang bells in celebration of the Habsburg defeat of the Turkish navy at the Battle of Lepanto in 1572, it may have demonstrated some sense of connection to a wider Christian solidarity, or it may have been a celebration of the defeat of the Turks.¹⁸⁷

Parish culture had transformed long before the 1590s. Concerning fundraising, the collections on saints’ days had been replaced by rent collections. Concerning expenses, from a fifteenth-century focus on church upkeep, there emerged a tremendous concern with poor relief in the Elizabethan era. Six altars were gone, replaced by one communion table. and a myriad of saintly images were gone, replaced by whitewashed walls with some Bible verses on display. The “theatre of memory” had been re-envisioned in mid-century and for a while, perhaps a generation of worshippers may not have felt very connected to their church at all. The churchyard had become developed property providing twenty-four units of rental income. This urban community re-configured their tangled web of social relationships and addressed the problems that filled their daily lives as they re-invented their parish.

They also re-invented their history. Individual and collective identities require not just a sense of history for their own formation, but constant reinforcement and re-telling if that historical knowledge is to serve as a foundation for understanding the present. The preservation, editorialization, and institutionalization of parish history are just a part of what the records from Saint Michael Cornhill reveal over the long Tudor century. Parish office holders, merchants all, once coordinated numerous memories that anchored parish society under the guise of buying sand, glass, and mortar; yet they also removed or defaced the memorials of their predecessors and they jettisoned a great many items, many of them donated. The Reformation in this parish was as much about those actions, and those objects, and the memories associated with those objects, and their disposal, as it was about theology. Slowly, over several decades, the understanding of past, present, future, and the faith changed for the people of Saint Michael Cornhill.

Notes

1 Several historiographical essays of the English Reformation research have been published over the years, but for a recent conceptual analysis, see Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017): xi–xix.

2 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 Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016): 86–7.

3 Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 309–10.

4 Jane Sayers and Leslie Watkiss (eds.), Thomas Marlborough, History of Evesham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003): 136–7; Paul Jeffries, The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren (London: Hambledon Press, 1996): 301; W.H. Overall, The Accounts of the Churchwardens of the Parish of St Michael, Cornhill, in the City of London, from 1456 to 1608 (London: privately printed, n.d.), vi; Richard Newcourt, Repertorium ecclesiasticum parochiale Londoniese. 2 vols (London: 1708): 479.

5 The CWA of Saint Michael Cornhill, 1455–1608: LMA MS P69/MIC2/B/006/MS04071/001, fos. 4v, 23v; Overall: 11, 55.

6 John Stow, A Survey of London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 1: 105.

7 Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013): 165–6.

8 I am inspired here by Peter Read’s statement that homes are mentally constructed, as referenced in John Schofield and Rosy Szymanski, “Sense of Place in a Changing World,” in John Schofield and Rosy Szymanski (eds.), Local Heritage, Global Context: Cultural Perspectives on Sense of Place (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011): 8.

9 Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 40.

10 It was not unusual for churchwardens to establish special committees or officers to oversee projects. See Gabriel Byng, Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 160–1, and 174–7.

11 The CWA of Saint Martin Outwich, 1508–1546: LMA MS PB69/MTN/3/B/004/MSO6842.

12 MS04071/001, fo. 8r; Overall: 20.

13 MS04071/001, fos. 20v, 21v, 23a, 24v; Overall, Accounts, 47–9.

14 John Schofield, The Building of London from the Conquest to the Great Fire (London: British Museum Press, 1993): 150.

15 Charles Pendrill, Old Parish Life in London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937): 100.

16 MS04071/001, fo. 85v.

17 Stow, Survey, 1: 198.

18 MS04071/001, fo. 20r; Overall, Accounts, 46 (1471).

19 John Schofield, “Saxon and Medieval Parish Churches in the City of London: A Review,” TLMAS 45 (1994): 74. Rudstone was buried in a vault in the church near the cross and pulpit. TNA PROB 11–24–106.

20 See entries in accounts for 1457, 1459, 1460, 1464, 1468, 1469, 1470, 1473. MS04071/001, fos. 4r, 6v, 8r, 12r, 16v, 17v, 19r, and 22r; Overall, Accounts, 11, 16, 19, 26, 37, 41, 44, 49 and 50.

21 MS04071/001, fo. 6v; Overall, Accounts, 16.

22 MS04071/001, fo. 3r; Overall, Accounts, 8.

23 MS04071/001, fos. 5v, 12r, 16v, and 22r; Overall, Accounts, x, 11, 13, 26, 28, 34, 37, 50, and 147; Roger Horold (1340), Ralph Folket, chandler (1361), Thomas Leuesham, skinner (1389), Cal Husting 1: 438, 2: 21, 2: 273–4; The Commissary Court Wills, LMA MS DL/C/B/004/MS09171/7, 1483–89, fos. 67r–68v.

24 Stephen Dawbeny, skinner (1387), Cal Hustings 2: 261; MS04071/001, fos. 13r, 15v, and 16v; and Overall, Accounts, x, 28, 34, and 38; MS09171/7, 1483–89, fos. 67r–68v.

25 John Drope’s will (1485) refers twice to a “side altar,” which is, perhaps, also Mr. Alderman’s altar? MS04071/001, fos. 8r and 29r; Overall, Accounts, x, 19, and 68; MS09171/7, 1483–89, fos. 67r–68v.

26 Arthur Henry Johnson, The History of the Worshipful Company of the Drapers: Preceded by an Introduction on London and Her Guilds, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914): 1: 110 ff, 164–5.

27 Drapers’ Hall, Wardens’ Accounts, 1475–1509, fo. 75v.

28 Draper’s Hall, Q8: Bull of Alexander VI.

29 In his life, Brugge would be a master of the company and an Alderman of London. Drapers’ Hall, Wardens’ Accounts, 1475–1509, fo. 81r; expenses incurred by John Brugge in 1501–1502; see also MS Q2. See also, Laura Branch, Faith and Fraternity: London Livery Companies and the Reformation, 1510–1603 (Leiden: Brill, 2017): 26.

30 Drapers’ Hall, Wardens’ Accounts, 1475–1509, fos. 23r and 87v; Newcourt, Repertorium ecclesiasticum, 479–82.

31 Branch, Faith and Fraternity, 38; J.P.D. Cooper, “Rowland Philipps,” in ODNB (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 44: 49–50.

32 For example, see Draper’s Hall, Wardens Accounts, 1508–1546, fos. 23r, 54r, and 71r.

33 Branch, Faith and Fraternity, 38.

34 The VM of Saint Michael Cornhill, 1563-1646-47: LMA MS P69/MIC2/B/001/MS04072, fo. 9; Branch: 27.

35 MS04071/001, fo. 88v; Overall, Accounts, 163 and 163 ff.

36 Bottles of wine were sent to the bishop in 1557; a silver cup for the company will be mentioned below. MS04071/001, fo. 52r; Overall, Accounts, 135.

37 Overall, Accounts, ix.

38 Ibid., ix.

39 Tai Liu, Puritan London: A Study of Religion and Society in the City Parishes (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1986): 35.

40 Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 13.

41 Ibid.: 186; Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London, 1580–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 59.

42 MS04071/001, fos. 5r, 6r, 8r, 18r, and 23r; Overall, Accounts, 12, 15, 20, 42, and 53.

43 MS04071/001, fos.9v, 11v, and 17r; Overall, Accounts, 21, 26, and 36.

44 MS04071/001, fos. 3r, 4v, 12v, 18r, 20v, 22v; Overall, Accounts, 7, 9, 27, 42, 48, 51, and 52.

45 Jane was married three times, but her first husband seems to have been of little historical importance. Susan E. James, Women’s Voices in Tudor Wills, 1450–1603. Authority, Influence and Material Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015): 159.

46 Steve Rappaport, World within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 27.

47 Joseph Lemuel Chester, The Parish Registers of Saint Michael, Cornhill, London, Containing the Marriages, Baptisms, and Burials from 1546 to 1754 (London: Harleian Society, 1882): 5, 76, 182.

48 For Thomas Lodge, see Chester, The Parish Registers of Saint Michael, Cornhill: 181; MS04071/001, fos. 27r, 28r, 30r, 34r, 37r, 43r, 43v, 45v, 48v, and 49r; and, Overall, Accounts, 61, 62, 70, 90, 110, 112, 117, 127, and 219.

49 For George Hynde, see MS04071/001, fos. 27r, 28r, 30r, 34r, 35r, 36r, 40r, 40v, and 43v; Overall, Accounts, 61, 62, 70, 80, 83, 84, 87, 99, 102, 112, and 219.

50 The PR of Saint Michael Cornhill, 1546–1653, LMA MS P69/MIC2, fo. 120.

51 MS04071/001, fo. 22r; Overall, Accounts, 50.

52 Occasional wills might hint at a women’s networks of support, but the evidence if too thin. See, for example, the will of Margaret Wytche (1548), which lef her possessions to two women with instructions to sell the items and pay her debts; none of the three women appear in the churchwardens’ accounts. Commissary Court Wills, DL/C/B/004/MS09171/11, 1539–48, fo. 209v. Also, the will of Avice Warde, widow (1552/53) left her goods to a kinswoman and her husband. Commissary Court Wills, DL/C/B/004/MS09171/12, 1548–53, fo. 140v.

53 Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988): Chapter 6.

54 Marshall, Heretics and Believers, 284–5; Albert Frederick Pollard, Henry VIII (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1919): 416–17.

55 Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993): 169.

56 In 1460, churchwardens paid a sergeant to arrest Thomas Lyffyn, and then paid for arbitration at the Cardinal’s Hat and the Swan. See MS04071/001, fo. 8r; Overall, Accounts, 19; Cal Husting 2: 592.

57 TNA PROB 11–11–748; also mentioned in MS09171/7, 1483–89, fos. 67r–68v.

58 Cal Husting, 2: 608–9.

59 TNA PROB 11–21–498.

60 John Cok, chandler (1388), Andrew Smyth, “pyebaker” (1400), Thomas Lyffyn, draper (1491), Cal Husting, 2: 266, 2: 345–6, 2: 592; Overall, Accounts, xx.

61 Roger Stokton, brewer (1427), Roger Kelsey, draper (1458), Cal Husting, 2: 444, 2: 536.

62 Overall, Accounts, xx; Alice Hongreforth, widow (1504), Cal Husting, 2: 608–9; C.J. Kitching (ed.), London and Middlesex Chantry Certificates, 1548 (London: London Record Society, 1980): 7; TNA PROB 11–11–748.

63 Ken Farnhill, Guilds and the Parish Community in Late Medieval East Anglia, c. 1470–1550 (York: York Medieval Press, 2001): 153.

64 The Commissary Court Wills, LMA MS DL/C/B/004/MS09171/10, 1522–39, fo.177v; MS04071/001, fos. 4r, 5v, 6v, 9r, and 15v; Overall, Accounts, 11, 13, 15, 16, 21, 34, and 35.

65 MS04071/001, fo. 7r; Overall, Accounts,17.

66 MS04071/001, fo. 24v; Overall, Accounts, 57.

67 H.B. Walters states that this is an image of the Annunciation. TNA PRO E 117 4/77: Saint Michael Cornhill: 2v, 2r, 3r; H.B. Walters, London Churches at the Reformation (London: SPCK, 1939): 493–5.

68 Muriel C. McClendon, “A Moveable Feast: Saint George’s Day Celebrations and Religious Change in Early Modern England,” JBS 38 (1999): 6.

69 Samantha Riches, Saint George (London: Reaktion Books, 2015): 69–72.

70 Gail McMurray Gibson, “Saint Anne and the Religion of Childbed: Some East Anglian Texts and Talismans,” in Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorm (eds) Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990): 101; Virginia Nixon, Mary’s Mother: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Europe (University Park.. PA: Penn State University Press, 2004): 11.

71 Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992): 171.

72 A fifteenth-century statue of Saint Christopher, discovered behind a wall in Newgate, is now a part of the collection of the London Museum. Bruno Barber, Christopher Thomas, and Bruce Watson, Religion in Medieval London, Archaeology and Belief (London: Museum of Archaeology, 2013): 51; Brian Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges (London: The Stationery Office for the Museum of London, 1998): 181.

73 Hazel Forsyth, “An Inscribed Sixteenth-Century English Silver-Gilt Chape,” The Burlington Magazine 138, 1119 (1996): 393; Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, 178.

74 Carolyn King Stephens, “Milieu, John Strecche and Gawain-Poet,” Fifteenth Century Studies 37 (2012): 163.

75 Mary Clayton and Hugh Magennis (eds.), The Old English Lives of Saint Margaret (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 4–5.

76 The same saints tend to dominate the dedications of parish fraternities, see Peters, Patterns of Piety 110.

77 Cal Husting 2: 626; John Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster. available at: www.hrionline.ac.uk/strype/TransformServlet?page=book2_145.

78 Eamon Duffy has found several examples of women providing patronage for the restoration of rood screens, but they selection of the saints was a collaboration. See Eamon Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (London: Bloomsbury, 2012): 71.

79 Overall, Accounts, 150.

80 See Chapter 5.

81 Riches, Saint George, 99.

82 MS04071/001, fo. 19r; Overall, Accounts, 44.

83 MS04071/001, fo. 24v; Overall, Accounts, 59.

84 Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill, The South English Legendary (London: Oxford University Press, 1967): 402.

85 The First and Second Prayer Books of King Edward the Sixth (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, n.d.): 205; also maintained in the 1559 prayer book, see The Book of Common Prayer 1559; John E. Booty (ed.) The Elizabethan Prayer Book (Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press and The Folger Shakespeare Library, 2005): 239.

86 MS04071/001, fo. 88v; Overall Accounts,163.

87 Ian Forrest, “The Politics of Burial in Late Medieval Hereford,” EHR 125, 516 (2010): 1136–7; Nigel Saul, English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages: History and Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 12.

88 Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 104.

89 Francis A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969); Schofield and Szymanski. “Sense of Place,” 1.

90 Maria Lewicka, “In Search of Roots: Memory as Enabler of Place Attachment,” in Lynne C. Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright (eds.), Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications (London: Routledge, 2014): 50–1.

91 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 327–37.

92 Ibid., 301; Shagan, Popular Politics, 241.

93 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 124–5; Shagan, Popular Politics, 240.

94 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Siân Jones and Lynette Russell, “Archaeology, Memory, and Oral Tradition: An Introduction,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16(2) (2012): 269.

95 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 52–3.

96 MS09171/7, 1483–89, fos. 67r-68v.

97 Cal Hustings, 2: 592–3; TNA PROB 11–8-72.

98 Stow fails to acknowledge Drope as a draper. Newcourt, Repertorium ecclesiasticum, 479; Stow, Survey, 1:197; TNA PROB 11–8-72.

99 Stow, Survey, 1: 196–97.

100 Peter Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008): xiii. See also, Judith Pollman, Memory in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017): Chapter 1.

101 Ian Archer, “The Arts and Acts of Memorialization in Early Modern London,” in J.F. Merritt (ed.) Imagining Early Modern London. Perceptions & Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 90.

102 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 153; Pollman. Memory, 54–5; Shagan, Popular Politics, 240.

103 Alexandra Walsham, “Recycling the Sacred: Material Culture and Cultural Memory after the English Reformation,” Church History 86(4) (2017): 1128–9.

104 Schofield, “Medieval Parish Churches in the City of London,” 38; Vanessa Harding, “‘And One More May Be Laid There’: The Location of Burials in Early Modern London,” LJ 14 (1989): 112–29.

105 MS04071/001, fo. 85v.

106 Reginald R. Sharpe (ed.), Calendar of Letter-Books Preserved among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall, Letter-Book K. Temp. Henry VI (London: Corporation of London, John Edward Francis, 1911): 66.

107 Cal Husting, 2: 626–7.

108 Clive Burgess, “London Parishioners in Times of Change: Saint Andrew Hubbard, Eastcheap, c. 1450–1570,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (2002): 53.

109 Stow, Survey, 1: 197.

110 Cal Husting, 2: 528.

111 Stow, Survey, 1: 197; TNA PRO PROB 11–17–420.

112 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 269; Sherlock, Monuments, 103.

113 John Edmund Cox, The Annals of Saint Helen’s, Bishopsgate, London (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876): 59; Sherlock, Monuments, 111.

114 TNA PRO PROB 11–78–90.

115 TNA PRO PROB 11–5-186.

116 Brigden, London and the Reformation, 209ff.

117 All information re. Downes, see Alex Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 241.

118 W.K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Young King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971): 394–5.

119 MS04071/001, fo.32r; Overall, Accounts, 75.

120 When the parish’s churchwardens’ accounts begin again, after a seventy-three-year gap, three separate records exist for 1548. Three accounts also survive from 1549, while two accounts exist for 1551 and 1552. There exists just one extant account for 1550.

121 MS04071/001, fo. 27r; Overall, Accounts, 62.

122 MS04071/001, fo. 28v; Overall, Accounts, 65.

123 MS04071/001, fo. 29r; Overall, Accounts, 69–70.

124 MS04071/001, fos. 28v, 29r; Overall, Accounts, 65–6.

125 MS04071/001, fo. 28v; Overall, Accounts, 65.

126 MS04071/001, fo. 28v, 29r, and 29v; Overall, Accounts, 66, 67, and 68.

127 MS04071/001, fo. 32r; Overall, Accounts, 75.

128 MS04071/001, fo. 33r; Overall, Accounts, 77–8.

129 TNA PRO E177 4/77; Walters, London Churches, 493–500.

130 Thomas Milbourn, The History of the City Church of St Mildred the Virgin (London: John Russell Smith, 1872), 40; Cox, Churchwardens’ Accounts, 133.

131 MS04956/001, fos. 176b and 178b.

132 Gordon Huelin, “A Sixteenth Century Churchwardens’ Account Book of Saint Margaret Moses,” GSLH 1(1) (1973): 1–6.

133 Ronald Hutton, “The Local Impact of the Tudor Reformations,” in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 126.

134 Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 477.

135 Shagan, Popular Politics, 296–7.

136 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 493.

137 Brigden, London and the Reformation, 424, 429–30.

138 J.J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985): 90.

139 Alexandra Walsham argues that many folks bought these items to convert the objects into items for use in their homes. This may be seen as migrating the sacred and the mnemonic from church to home. Walsham, “Recycling the Sacred.”

140 MS04071/001, fo. 44v; Overall, Accounts, 115.

141 Ronald Hutton alleges that it was gone prior to Bishop Ridley’s campaign of April 1550. Ronald Hutton, “The Local Impact of the Tudor Reformations,” 125.

142 MS04071/001, fos. 35 r, 46r; Overall, Accounts, 84, 120–1.

143 Commissary Court Wills, DL/C/B/004/MS09171/13, 1553–58, fos. 1v–2r.

144 MS04071/001, fo. 44r; Overall, Accounts, 113.

145 MS04071/001, fo. 43v; Overall, Accounts, 111.

146 MS04071/001, fo. 43v; Overall, Accounts, 112.

147 MS04071/001, fo. 44v; Overall, Accounts, 115.

148 MS04071/001, fos. 57v and 58r; Overall, Accounts, 150.

149 Other parishes with such lectureships included Saint Benet Gracechurch Street and Allhallows Staining by 1551. See Paul S. Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970): 80.

150 MS04071/001, fos. 98r and 99v; Overall, Accounts, 167 and 167ff.

151 Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships, 124.

152 Overall, Accounts, 176.

153 Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001): 15.

154 Leo Solt, Church and State in Early Modern England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990): 68–73.

155 MS04071/001, fo. 65r; Overall, Accounts, 153.

156 Sherlock, Monuments, 103.

157 Given that the Royal Arms and Decalogue are generally found in the London churches by the Elizabethan era, I am assuming they were at Saint Michael Cornhill too.

158 MS04072, fo. 1.

159 MS04072, fo. 7.

160 MS04072, fo. 15.

161 Overall, Accounts, 238.

162 Ibid., 242.

163 The CWA of Saint John Zachary, 1591–1682: LMA MS P69/JNZ/B/014/MS00590/001, fo. 25r.

164 W. K. Jordan, The Charities of London, 1480–1660: The Aspirations and Achievements of the Urban Society (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1960): 244.

165 Robert Jütte, “Poor Relief and Social Discipline in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” European Studies Review 11 (1981): 31.

166 Memorandum attached to the accounts for 1580. The CWA of Saint Botolph without Bishopsgate, 1567–1632, LMA MS P69/BOT4/B/008/MS04524/001. For more on bread charities, see Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, ca. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009): 149–54.

167 Edwin Freshfield (ed.), Accomptes of the Churchwardens if the Parysche of Saint Christofer’s in London, 1575 to 1663 (London: Rixon and Arnold, 1885): 26.

168 MS04956/001, 1491–1628.

169 Sacramental Account and Brief Book of the Parish Church of Allhallows Staining, 1585–1664, LMA MS P69/ALH6/A/019/MS04959, fo. 7r.

170 Stow, Survey, 1: 148.

171 Commissary Court Wills, DL/C/B/004/MS09171/13, 1553–58, fo. 36r.

172 MS04071/001, fo. 42v; Overall, Accounts, 109–10.

173 MS04071/001, fo. 66v; Overall, Accounts, 154.

174 Overall, Accounts, 237.

175 Ibid.: 237.

176 MS04071/001, fo.105r; Overall, Accounts, 169.

177 MS04071/001, fo. 134r.

178 Overall, Accounts, 184.

179 Brigden, London and the Reformation, 482.

180 Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670, 243–4.

181 TNA PROB 11–60–509.

182 TNA PROB 11–78–35.

183 Cal Hustings 2: 710–11.

184 Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime, and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 109.

185 Overall, Accounts, 189.

186 MS04071/001, fo. 135r.

187 MS04071/001, fos. 98r and 99v; Overall, Accounts, 166, 167, and 167ff.