Conclusion¹

The 1559 accounts of Saint James Garlickhythe list four entries “for knells and for covering … [of graves],” each at 2 s. 4 d. ² Dealing with the dead was always a major aspect of London’s parish culture, but what that meant changed drastically over the course of the Tudor era. Elizabethan burial rituals differed from those of the medieval church, and the theology of purgatory was denied, yet the grief and emotion in the face of death remained. In 1602, Frederic Gerschow, tutor to the Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, noted that when a person is lying in extremis, the bells of the parish are touched with the clappers until he either dies or recovers. As soon as this sign is given, everyone in the streets as well as in the houses falls on his knees and offers a prayer for the sick person.³

The parish records from Saint Dunstan in the West contain a memorandum that confirms the practice of knelling the bell when a parishioner lies in peril of death and yet the city could not come to a stop every time a person was in the process of dying.⁴ It appears that Gerschow probably referred to the death of a prominent person. Numerous themes addressed throughout this book—dealing with birth and death, deferring to status, being pious, participating in the social aspects of religion—remained powerful at the end of the Tudor era—and so did the parish as the location for preaching, teaching, and the administration of the sacraments—but it was status that mattered most in the organization of parish culture.

Local personalities and institutions shaped parish societies and culture, and also played significant roles in the historical process of change in the Tudor-era and a microhistorical analysis of parish records has illuminated this social pattern. As revealed in these five chapters, various parish officials documented their unique experiences within their financial accounts, inventories, vestry minutes, memorials, wills, and registers. The basic similarities found among London parishes included the general arc of religious transformation, the series of legally required changes, and the general cultural assumptions about the role of the parish in Tudor life. Unique qualities included the variations defining parish demographics and wealth, and—thanks to the malleable parochial system—the ways local personalities exercised some latitude to appropriate and shape the universal faith. As asserted in that final observation, somewhere between the shared and the unique attributes is the nature of the parish elites. Each parish had a very different set of social and economic forces that imbued some in the neighborhood with greater significance.

Each chapter highlighted the local elite, those who had to succeed in solving numerous tasks against an ever-changing array of objectives and obstacles such as local confusion over government and ecclesiastical directives, economic scarcity, bureaucratic oversight, parish tradition, and so on. Sometimes, churchwardens left rather direct evidence as to who mattered in their parish. Clive Burgess found in the records from Saint Mary at Hill, 1486, a diagram composed of a series of lozenges arranged to create a pyramidal shape, with each lozenge containing a few names.⁵ Burgess argued that these ca. sixty to seventy people, mostly men, were the significant parishioners who occupied offices, oversaw various tasks, and basically ran the parish—in essence, they were the parishioners. In a study of Saint Margaret Westminster, Katherine French mapped widespread parish participation and argued for a different and more flexible model of a parishioner.⁶ On 25 October 1545, a meeting in the vestry at Saint Martin Outwich assessed each “dwelling house w[ith]in the parishe,” quarterly rates for the clerk’s wage. This memorandum is more definitive than the diagram in the records from Saint Mary at Hill, because it makes clear the parish leaders identified individuals as heads of households. The resulting assessment list contains fifty-eight entries, most (forty) are men’s names, a few (four) women appear, others lack gender specificity, and still others refer to places where groups of people would have to pay their assessments corporately: a men’s almshouse, a women’s almshouse, “everyone” in Hamond Alley and Laweden Alley.⁷ The assessment list, like the diagram to be found in the records of Saint Mary at Hill, suggests a socio-economic model of parish society in the general shape of a social pyramid.

The parish elite was not an undifferentiated body. People who tended to run the parish offices tended to occupy the middle to upper reaches of the socio-economic scale, but were seldom in the very top group. Those at the very top tended to have served in parish offices at one time, but about one or two decades before the dates of documents proving their high status in the parish. Yet these few folks still attended vestries and meetings and clearly exerted a powerful influence. Those in the bottom of the socio-economic levels might only occupy the more menial parish jobs, or receive parish assistance, or offer prayers. Of course, what empowered some over others rested upon a series of variables, yet the social model was immediately perceptible in the various chapters of this book. Status was locally defined, and the parish, with its rituals, memorials, and record keeping, served as an arena for the articulation of those relationships and, by the end of the era, the pew rental charges allowed for the parish hierarchy to demonstrate its significance at every service; the society was on display for all to see, each according to his rank.

Chapter 1 introduced all these themes as the parishioners of Allhallows London Wall created several lists to solve financial problems, but they ordered benefactors by status based on spiritual markers, gender, wealth, and social function. Other parishes expressed the theme of status differently, but they all did so, and there were several examples of parish officials dealing with people both in more exalted and lesser positions of social prestige. This general model of social hierarchy proved to be essential for the successful implementation of the various changes of the Tudor age, and, as was seen in Chapter 4, when a parish lacked authoritative institutions or individuals to assist in de-escalating concerns, conflict could result.

The role of ushering the parish through the legal requirements of the age might play to the benefit of a privileged person. This social connection was part of the nature of the monarchical church.⁸ By implementing the government’s policies, the churchwardens, vestrymen, clerks, and other parish leaders had essentially agreed to work with and support the government within their own parish; they were working with the monarch.⁹ Parish officials became key players in the changes and left lots of documents attesting to their actions. Of course, it was up to the monarch to keep the troops together. If two different officials, both the king’s men, understood policy differently because the policy lacked clarity, then trouble might result. But even in the troubled world of Saint Botolph Aldgate, the monarch could set the tone, as proved by the change of perspective in the churchwardens’ accounts following the death of Edward VI and the succession of Mary I. But the anti-papal rhetoric from the 1530s on, which focused loyalty on the Royal Supremacy, also helped to prioritize the monarchical connection. Working with the monarch’s wishes displayed the loyalty of the parishioner for all to see. Perhaps the Royal Supremacy operated a bit like Queen Mary’s speech at the Guildhall at the time of Wyatt’s rebellion or Queen Elizabeth’s speech at the coming of the Armada; those who were with the monarch were ennobled by their actions, those in opposition were traitors.¹⁰

The Tudor parish was a multifaceted institution, but it was first and foremost a religious institution. Most encounters with the sacred brought the attention of parishioners to the edifice of the church, the parish officials, the most recent transformations, or even to the other parishioners. Yet parish records rarely articulate sophisticated theological formulae or political ideas. Therefore, a study of churchwardens’ accounts and other parish records requires a focus on other things such as the church as a space for the performance of faith, public prayer, and the administration of the sacraments. At first, such an approach appears to confirm the process described by J.J. Scraisbrick: “altars, roods and rood lofts, statues and holy-water stoups and so on were taken down in Edward’s reign, put back in Mary’s and taken down again after Elizabeth’s accession without great drama or disorder.”¹¹ But one is left to explore complex concepts as represented by actions and objects. We cannot know what people believed, but this approach allows a glimpse into how parish religious practices were experienced and orchestrated during a most unusual period. Throughout the study, the emphasis has been on the local interpretation and reception of larger teachings and requirements. An examination of the social dimension of religious ideas or teachings or national laws requires reflection on the complex manner by which local people understood, interpreted, and instituted such things.¹² The parish afforded just such a corporate system of appropriation and interpretation, guided by local elites.

Local personalities mattered. These characters have been mostly ignored by historians unless they did something that got them into trouble and they became a cause célèbre. But many people across the city’s parishes had to work with government policies to make them succeed. At the level of the parish, it can be difficult to ascertain names, much less anything more substantial, but this study has achieved some success in finding information regarding key individuals in all five parishes, and, even when the evidence is sparse, an image of the main group emerges. The main lessons proffered demonstrate the benefits of good will and people working together to solve problems, or at the very least, the ability to create legitimating records that project an image of communal goodwill. The London parish was incredibly successful in diffusing tensions in a time when many European cities were, in fact, heading for conflict. One technique to achieve the good will might have included rituals such as church ales, May games, boy bishops, and Hock Day, in the early period, and the focus on godliness and poor relief in the later one. Added to that was the role of the monarch in the church. More significantly on a day-to-day basis was the deference to local status. The local community held.

While one would always desire more information about the parishioners, the prosopographical aspect of this study did produce some interesting mini-biographies about the most significant men who appear in the records. These “parish masters” made the parish system work. If we seek to imagine the mental world of such men, we should remember that many approached their tasks with variable degrees of enthusiasm. Still the fifteenth-century churchwardens occupied a cultural world-view in which they worked to maintain a holy and universal institution. Their tasks included many things beyond ordinary church upkeep, such as the building of memorials, repair of a saint’s image, ascertaining the observance of obits, and arranging burials and funerals. If churchwardens wished to be successful in office, they had to be assiduous in maintaining the platforms and operations connected to the theologies of the mass, of purgatory, and of the intercession of the saints. A great deal of the pre-Reformation churchwardens’ time was spent facilitating and supporting the medieval faith.

By the Elizabethan era, the London churchwardens operated in a vastly different fashion. They worked for reform, of course, but they also oversaw funeral arrangements and occasionally dealt with bequests that left money to the parish to establish sermons or distribute alms to the poor; yet their major tasks frequently included arranging for the streets and gutters to be cleaned, policing the wandering poor, overseeing the care of orphans and foundlings, and, as one might expect, general upkeep. It is difficult to know whether the change should be labelled as an example of secularization or its opposite, the expansion of religious boundaries into the community, but it was a fundamental transformation.

That transformation has been documented in this book. Each chapter examined five local societies, characterized by unique economies and cultures, which meant that their parish religion and the Reformation of that religion were their own. A major reason for such variation is based on the nature of the city itself. It was a complex world of distinct neighborhoods, and the extant records provide some insight into that variation. The churchwardens’ accounts contain rich information that provides memoranda of human interactions at a range of social levels not typically encountered elsewhere in Tudor-era sources. They have attracted the attention of many academics and antiquarians, but those same records can also provoke frustration since their titbits of information provide only brief glimpses of various kinds of actions that all too often leave the researcher wondering what it all may mean. The records have also generated a vigorous debate on methodologies and interpretations.¹³

Discerning meaning can often be a challenge. In 1559, the churchwardens at Saint Benet Gracechurch Street paid 12 d. to “Bryght the Scrivener for writing of a bill which was delivered unto the archdeacon which was to certifie then whether there were any anabaptist or erroneous opinions w^tn the parishe.”¹⁴ A look at the 1559 churchwardens’ accounts from Saint Alphage reveals no such payment for a similar certificate; however, the churchwardens did pay for breakfast on the “day that we dyd serch for images that were paynted.”¹⁵ No doubt the two entries were both inspired by the same impetus, the 1559 Injunctions, interpreted in different ways, dutifully fulfilled and documented differently. The churchwardens at Saint Botolph Aldersgate were more spartan in their accounts, but they acknowledge the purchase of the Injunctions, a communion book, the removal of Saint George, and the writing of visitation articles.¹⁶ And two entries in the churchwardens’ accounts at Saint Michael le Querne offer the following,

It[e]m for a Bok of the Innuctions & Articles

4 d. … It[em] payde at the visitation for the Recept 6 d.¹⁷

“The receipt” and “the certificate” undoubtedly referred to the same sort of document. These citations illustrate part of the problem in working with parish records, which were locally created and understood by people who lived about 500 years ago. They show little uniformity even when addressing the same sort of action inspired by the same political/religious requirement because they express local and fragmented vernaculars. Contextualization helps, but also requires knowledge of the social history of the parish, the operations of the church and city, perhaps the people involved, the history of the Tudor era, and more. It is not so much that their information is two-dimensional; rather the information is coded and sometimes the codes changed.

1559 began with a new monarch and soon introduced a new Archbishop of Canterbury (Matthew Parker) and a new Bishop of London (Edmund Grindal). It was a new and different era for the London parishes too, although many parish leaders may have been wary of anything being permanent by the start of Elizabeth’s reign. The 1559 churchwardens, undoubtedly the sort of men who rotated in and out of those offices, sought to maintain the successful operations of the parish. It was an old system and it brought an aura of continuity to parish culture even in the years of transformation. The attention of those churchwardens of 1559 would most certainly have been on these new Injunctions, which sought to suppress “superstition,” and they faced an upcoming visitation as well. Yet the Injunctions inspired different behavior in different parishes, and the churchwardens’ notations cited above seem almost unconnected to a common endeavor.¹⁸

The extant records can be idiosyncratic, and scholars have long been baffled by the quirks, oddities, and anomalies. This study has set out to demonstrate that idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and inconsequential are not blanket terms that can be cast over a city’s extant parish records, but that what might baffle a twenty-first-century researcher could have made perfect sense to a sixteenth-century parishioner. Authorial assumptions and strategies are the two main issues. For example, several parishes recorded a Bible on their 1552 Inventories when others did not at a time when it would be safe to assume that they all—or almost all—possessed one. Saint Lawrence Pountney purchased one for 6 s. in 1542 and, indeed, registers ownership of it a decade later.¹⁹ The 1552 inventory for Holy Trinity the Less listed a lectern for the Bible, but no Bible (did they consider it the vicar’s?).²⁰ On the other hand, at Saint Margaret Moses, the church whose rector was John Roger, one-time friend of the deceased William Tyndale, the churchwardens listed none. The only possible explanation for this pattern must parallel the one revealed in the responses to the 1559 Injunctions; churchwardens understood what they were supposed to do differently and recorded it as they saw fit. Was the Bible such an obvious part of the parish, like the building’s roof, that there was no need to list it? Or was it a mistake?

Figuring out how the local merchants and craftsmen who served as churchwardens conceptualized their responses is the ultimate task. Their records made sense within their communities. And while writing their notes and doing their tasks, they were also doing many other, often quite mundane, things. Meanwhile, the world turned. The plague hit, the economy transformed, the population grew, endless directives regarding church architecture and liturgical practices arrived from on high, and the parish leaders had to adapt, sometimes heroically. Parish records were never intended to dissect parish beliefs and, thus, they do not provide us such information. They do, however, offer evidence of the unique blend of practices and problems in their parish.

The men who filled the various parish offices may usually be reconstructed, but their wives cannot. Before 1548, most London parishes probably had a women’s guild that formed a shadow system of parish leadership, none of which left written records; afterwards, we see the emergence of women inspired by the Word and active in promoting the Reformed faith, and sometimes they did produce documentation. When women appear in the institutional records, the sources typically project idealized constructs. Gender roles may have been culturally defined, but they were also locally constructed. At Allhallows London Wall, women with some standing in the parish participated in fundraising and thus, in some aspect of decision-making. One of the intriguing characters was “Pratt’s wife,” who must have been the head of a parish women’s guild for a time, because she delivers Hock money to her husband (1477–78) and, later, received special recognition at the election of the churchwardens in 1480–82. Simon Pratt and his wife donated money to the restoration of the church’s organ. We do not know her name, but she was certainly a parish leader in the late fifteenth century. Yet, the visibility of “the wives” in the records from Allhallows London Wall prove to be the exception, not the standard, for the city. Here and there, exceptional women of status could appear and exercise influence, such as Jane Viscountess Lisle at Saint Michael Cornhill, who funded a restoration of the rood screen, or Dame Elizabeth Bryce (Brice), the widow of Hugh Bryce (knight, alderman, and goldsmith), who left a quitrent connected to three tenements payable to Saint Mary Woolnoth to support an obit and payments to the poor.²¹ Women such as these occasionally appear in the records and achieve some desired action, and not just at the parish. In 1521, Lady Rede (Read), the widow of the former warden of the Goldsmiths and master of the royal mint Bartholomew Rede, agreed to donate 350 marks to the company for the distribution of coal to the poor in the parishes of Saint John Zachary, Saint Mary Staining, Saint Anne, Saint Michael Crooked Lane, Saint Vedast Foster Lane, and Saint Peter Westcheap.²² Widows making a bequest or overseeing the last wishes of their husbands was a common reason for the appearance of a woman in financial accounts. Such behavior by exceptional widows—widows with wealth and status—might have provided an example of leadership for women’s public participation in the parish, but a widow exercising religious rites for her husband was also an understandable public role for women in the Tudor age; and it was both an acceptable and a temporary action. The entries in churchwardens’ accounts, wills, wardens’ accounts, etc., represent a construction of gender by the London merchants that focused on and approved of philanthropic widows taking actions to benefit the souls of their husbands.

Evidence regarding a more active and direct participation of the wives and widows in London’s parish culture and society are few, but they do exist. One finds, for example, entries about the wives’ knell or a maiden’s gallery, both mentioned in the churchwardens’ accounts, and a purification cloth recorded on an inventory at Saint Peter Westcheap, but those originate from a parish in which wealthy men of status and privilege appear throughout. The goodwives of the parish would have possessed a formidable degree of social privilege as well, given that they would have shared the social place of their husbands. The other four parishes, less wealthy and less privileged, make no mention of a such things. The assortment of church ales and other popular festivals, therefore, is one obvious place for women’s organization to become visible. Other patterns might also be discerned, but are just too inconclusive, such as the rood altar at Saint Peter Westcheap with altar cloths decorated with women saints, and the rood alter dedicated to Mary at Saint Stephen Coleman Street framed with images of Saint Katherine and Saint Nicholas, at which four embroidered coats were used to dress the image of Mary. Could there have been a tradition in London of creating a focus for women’s devotions at rood altars? Possibly. Women may have been busy throughout the city in parish guilds and with philanthropy, but the city’s churchwardens were mostly negligent in their acknowledgment of them.

The most unusual new character in this study does not even appear in her parish’s churchwardens’ accounts: Dorcas Eccleston Martin from Saint Peter Westcheap. As her biography by Micheline White reveals, Dorcas was an active, creative, and determined force in her parish. A literate goodwife devoted to Calvinism, she would appear to represent the sort of religious transformation initiated by the Tudor Reformations. But in a fundamental way, she stood in the tradition of generations of significant women in London who sought to shape the liturgy, fix the organ, make or donate ecclesiastical garments, establish a special altar, and improve the religious conduct in her parish; almost all of them were invisible or barely visible in their parish records. Dorcas Eccleston Martin followed a belief different from that of her predecessors, but her general parish leadership carried on the tradition. Of course, “the Godly woman” was one of the models of an English woman, but it has a special manifestation from the late Elizabethan era into the early Stuart period.²³ Dorcas was celebrated in her own day for her personal qualities that inspired goodness in others, quite like the role the late medieval goodwives had occupied—and like the women saints, too. As Micheline White has noted, Richard occupied offices that influence behavior in one way, his wife inspired others by her learning and her inherent qualities.²⁴ Dorcas, empowered by her education and religious beliefs, politicized her actions in a manner different from that of most of her predecessors.

And yet churchwardens’ accounts do not achieve a better standard with most men either. The institutionalized office of the churchwarden is implicitly present with every collection or expenditure, as are numerous other men who did work for the parish, but churchwardens frequently failed to mention those who collected the clerk’s wage, sexton’s wage, or any number of other parish activities. Even an occasional appearance of such an activity provides the best insight that it was occurring in a parish. Status mattered, and so conducting mundane business for the parish might not have gained one much gratitude or name recognition, because the more elite men did not undertake such tasks—and yet many of the social elite had done so in their younger days, such as Richard Martin at Saint Peter Westcheap and several of the men assessed the largest amounts for the clerk’s wage at Saint Martin Outwich.²⁵ Many names tend not to be emphasized in churchwardens’ accounts because those records were not about people but rather institutional income and expenditures. Thus, mentioning a glazier or painter was enough, and finding the men who mattered requires looking for those few names mentioned, scattered over several years.

The English parish requires our attention (especially those from London) since they represent such an essential component in Tudor religious and social history. In London and the Reformation, Susan Brigden intimated that each city parish experienced its own Reformation; writing of 1547–48, she noted “[i]n every parish of London the battle for and against reform, for idolatry or iconoclasm, would be fought.”²⁶ She also noted how neighboring parishes could offer such contrasting examples in religious sensibilities, with one remaining steadfastly traditional and the other quickly and quietly becoming evangelical.²⁷ They were different, those parishes, almost like a patchwork quilt across the city. This study finds that parish records possess the potential to tell us a great deal about the character of those local communities and map diversity in early modern urban life.

Churchwardens’ accounts offer enticing examples of social behavior; for example, at Saint Andrew Hubbard parish where, between 1460 and 1465, the churchwardens paid 2 d. to the child of the Lord Mayor for dancing with the hobby horse.²⁸ Evidence of Hock-tide, May Day, and other “pastimes” may also be found scattered throughout the city. The celebration of a parish’s saint’s day is a much better documented parish observance than most; for example, the churchwardens at Saint Stephen Walbrook purchased bread, ale, and wine for the singers on 26 December 1530[?], and, in 1557, the parishioners at Saint Benet Gracechurch Street hosted their guest “singingmen” to drinks at the nearby tavern called The Ram’s Head (2 s. 8 d.).²⁹ In 1539, the churchwardens at Saint Mary Woolnoth paid 6 d. “plams flowers and cake on plame Sonday” and another 7 d. for “ale, brede, and wine geven to the preste and clerke at the reding of the passion.”³⁰ One methodological debate has been over what to do with scattered references to such interesting entries. This study has sought to address such events as these as part of the culture of a specific parish while referencing similar events that occurred nearby and thus, hopefully, locating what “suspend[ed]” those parishioners in an adequate “web of significance,” as Clifford Geertz wrote.³¹

As we have seen, however, the churchwardens’ accounts for any given London parish seldom record such things with consistency. This is where aggregating methodologies have proven useful in locating similar entries, and such approaches are especially helpful in mapping specific objects, or specific devotions and rituals, such as altars dedicated to this or that saint. But even the complicated relationship between the living and the dead that was so central to the medieval community paradigm and religious practices can be surprisingly vacant from the churchwardens’ accounts. Some parishes featured their mortuary endowments prominently, such as with Saint Mary at Hill, while some, such as Saint Michael Cornhill, reveal little to nothing of the subject in their extant records. Some parishes, such as Saint Margaret Soper Lane (also known as Saint Margaret Bridge Street and Saint Margaret New Fish Street) maintained a separate book that identified the various obligations that the pre-Reformation parish had for knells, obits, and other sundry prayers and observances for the dead.³² The pre-Reformation parishes most certainly took these obligations very seriously, but the level of obligation varied according to parish, and they remembered their duties in different ways.

Analysis of parish records becomes more problematic when addressing issues connected to the English Reformations because the connection between action and belief is not easily measurable. Laws and injunctions required implementation, and the local officials proceeded with it, sometimes more or less quickly, but the implementation almost always went forth. Whether a parish took an altar out prior to official orders or hesitated to comply with a new policy is nearly impossible to know because most accounts lack specific dates—and assuming a motivation for the behavior as due to the beliefs of some percentage of parishioners is very tricky. Trusting a churchwarden who stated that all or most of the parishioners agreed to an action would be unwise, as we have seen. The parish of Saint Helen Bishopsgate paid 2 s. to the scavenger concerning their rood screen and another 20 s. to have it painted in 1565.³³ Did the images of saints still cover it by that late date? The same parish paid in 1570 to have a chalice transformed into a communion cup, but neither of these actions offers proof of a conservative community because their actions might have arisen from any number of reasons.³⁴ In fact, behind the apparent ease with which the churchwardens documented their implementation of the directives to remove images, rood screens, and altars, were parish officials who possessed a vested interested in demonstrating their compliance with official directives and who sometimes mimicked the very language of those directives. Events such as the sale of church items becomes proof of belief or loss of belief, or conversion, only with difficulty, if at all. Even fourteenth- or fifteenth-century actions or trends, such as the 1417 request by John Bulstrode, goldsmith, who wished to be buried near the cross in Paul’s churchyard where the gospels are preached, risks becoming fodder for assumptions about the cultural transformation that established a foundation for sixteenth-century Protestantism.³⁵ The ultimate conversion of the English-speaking world has cast a formidable pall across interpretation of these sources and time periods, and all too quickly some unsuspecting fifteenth-century Christian action gets re-invented into a proto-Protestant one.

The larger point revealed in this study is that the local officials who traditionally had been responsible for keeping the parish bells, fabric, ornaments, and furniture, ultimately became the ones to arbitrate the change, regardless of whether the impetus for that change originated from the neighborhood or the hierarchy. That made all the difference. The politics of the Tudor dynasty impacted the world of these five London parishes in significant and profound ways, but the people who ultimately made changes were the local parish leaders. By doing so, they helped people to understand—ultimately—the changes and to fashion a sense of local attachment to the emerging and newly “reformed” culture.³⁶ This does not mean that coercion did not occur at every step of the Tudor religious policies, but that there was also an institutional structure for facilitating the transitions.

But the parish was not quite the same institution that it once had been after one hundred and eighteen years of Tudor rule. The continuity of local social relationships and the ways in which status and gender were recognized remained almost untouched by the changes. Yet, the laity had asserted a social priority over the clergy, claimed ownership of parish wealth, and demanded edifying sermons.³⁷ If the records of the laity do not seem to reflect much of the trauma or change of the Reformation, perhaps it was because the laity who produced most of the records were not the main targets of the government’s actions, at least not directly. Government oversight was much more intrusive into parish operations in the last part of the sixteenth century. Beat Kümin concluded that the crown was the main “beneficiary” of it all: the confiscations, the transformation of faith, and the anglicizing of the liturgy.³⁸ The increase in royal control of parish benefices offers some evidence, so does the increase in parish expenditure in dealing with hierarchies of varying sorts—royal, episcopal, archdeaconate, mayoral.³⁹

A study of five parishes in a city that had about one hundred parishes may seem to have barely scratched the surface of its potential topic, even if references to other parishes are employed for comparative purposes. Each of these parishes demonstrates the degree to which local individuals and initiatives helped parish communities shape their worship space and, thus, their experience of the liturgy, as well as the wider issues of philanthropy, communal memory, and education. In the early period, that allowed for each parish and the various groups within the parish to establish altars, images, lights, and fraternities, while also fashioning special devotions, prayers, and liturgies that spoke to and expressed those interests. By the end of the period, London’s parishes were negotiating a religious divide best expressed in the Elizabethan milieu by the debate between Whitgift and Cartwright, i.e., between more traditional and more reformed. From start to finish, we will never know exactly what the people in the pew believed (some probably just wished to get on with their life), but many were thoroughly engaged with their faith, and we sometimes know what their parish leaders decided to record.⁴⁰

The parish and its record-keeping tradition survived the Tudor Reformations. Despite its lack of mention in the Bible, even those reformers who most ardently sought to return to a primitive and scripturally based faith looked to the parish as the place to implement reforms. Thomas Cranmer’s Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum of 1552 included the provision that

in order that the parish boundaries shall become ever more familiar to everyone, we decree that each year the ministers of the church, with the wardens and four other men to be named by the wardens, shall go about the entire parish in the week of Pentecost, and inspect the boundaries and markers, and observe the present ancient limits of individual parishes.⁴¹

Cranmer’s reformed church law was never adopted, but the importance of “beating the bounds,” as the parish officials at Saint Stephen Coleman Street had reported doing in 1600, became a hallmark of late Elizabethan and early Stuart parish life. Of course, the churchwardens documented such events erratically. Still, walking the boundaries of the parish not only made them known to all parishioners, but also served as a means of establishing a shared sense of identity.⁴² In the final year of the sixteenth century, with the final Tudor monarch in her sixty-seventh year, the parishioners of Saint Bartholomew Exchange no longer processed for Palm Sunday or Corpus Christi, but they celebrated perambulation day with gifts to the children of the parish and breakfast at a local tavern known as “the Shippe.”⁴³ Such action did not, apparently, seem odd to their reformed and biblically based faith. As with all aspects of collective behavior and identity, the historical foundations and local traditions imbued the event with significance. The London parishes remained the centers and arbiters of those traditions throughout the Tudor era and it was the local elite, the parish masters, who plotted the path, worked with change, and filled in the details.