Select document: Catholic ownership of tithes: a County Wexford widow’s dispensation, 1595

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (162) ◽  
pp. 336-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Mac Cuarta

AbstractDown to the mid-nineteenth century, the rural population in Ireland was obliged by law to contribute to the upkeep of the Church of Ireland clergy by means of tithes, a measure denoting a proportion of annual agricultural produce. The document illustrates what was happening in the late sixteenth century, as separate ecclesial structures were emerging, and Catholics were beginning to determine how to support their own clergy. Control of ecclesiastical resources was a major issue for the Catholic community in the century after the introduction of the Reformation. However, for want of documentation the use of tithes to support Catholic priests, much less the impact of this issue on relationships within that community, between ecclesiastics and propertied laity, has been little noted. This text – a dispensation to hold parish revenues, signed by a papally-appointed bishop ministering in the south-east – illustrates how the recusant community in an anglicised part of Ireland addressed some issues posed by Catholic ownership of tithes in the 1590s. It exemplifies the confusion, competing claims, and anxiety of conscience among some who benefited from the secularisation of the church’s medieval patrimony; it also preserves the official response of the relevant Catholic ecclesiastical authority to an individual situation.

1991 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McCavitt

One of the liveliest debates in recent early modern Irish historiography has concerned the ‘failure’ of the Reformation in Ireland and when this occurred. Originally Professor Canny took issue with Dr. Brendan Bradshaw on this topic. Canny rejected Bradshaw’s thesis that the Reformation had failed in Ireland by 1558 and argued that counter-reformation catholicism only triumphed in the nineteenth century. Other contributions were then made to the debate by Dr. Alan Ford and later Karl Bottigheimer. Ford considered the 1590–1641 period as crucial, while Bottigheimer favoured the early seventeenth century as the key era. In the light of the work of Ford and Bottigheimer, Canny reconsidered the issue in an article published in 1986. He rejected what he believed to be Ford’s overly-pessimistic assessment that the Church of Ireland clergy soon despaired of the Reformation’s success in the seventeenth century. Instead, it is contended, Protestant clergy and laymen alike were optimistic that penal prosecution might still pave the way for considerable advances at this time. Moreover, Canny further argued that Ford was ‘mistaken in treating the clergy as an autonomous group and mistaken also in allowing excessive influence to ideology as the determinant of policy’.


1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (112) ◽  
pp. 345-352
Author(s):  
James Murray

One of the things which has united historians across the generations when writing about the Reformation in its Tudor Irish context is the conviction that the state was ultimately unsuccessful in securing the allegiance of the indigenous population to its religious dictates. Where this agreement has broken down, and continues to break down, is in the significance attached to the Tudor state’s failure, and in determining precisely when it became apparent.Until the end of the 1960s most examinations of sixteenth-century Ireland identified the Tudor failure as being synonymous with the practical and absolute failure of the Protestant Reformation. These studies were generally characterised by a partipris approach and by their employment of an interlinked and deterministic vision to explain this failure. Echoing the observations of contemporaries like Archbishop Loftus of Dublin, who spoke of the Irish people’s ‘disposition to popery’, writers of all religious persuasions saw the Reformation’s failure as an inevitable consequence of the inherently conservative character of the island’s inhabitants.


1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 279-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Kitching

The church has always experienced great difficulty in ministering to those dwelling in the remotest parts of its parishes. In this paper I shall look briefly at how the sixteenth century church coped with the problem, and attempt to answer two questions: what facilities for worship were available in outlying districts, and what was the impact of the reformation changes upon them?Chapels abounded in England on the eve of the reformation. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that wherever he lived a parishioner could, without an unreasonably arduous journey, reach a place where mass was sung or said. Quite apart from matters of spiritual and moral discipline, it was important for very practical reasons that he should be able to get quickly to church. Disaster could take hold in villages and townships if the entire population had set off on a long hike to a remote parish church and was unlikely to return for some hours. Moreover, the length of the hike determined the extent of the diversion of labour from other pursuits, notably in the fields at harvest time: indeed, this was to influence government rulings on the number of saints’ days to be observed by the laity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-237
Author(s):  
Leow Theng Huat

From the beginning of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, Protestants have departed from the long-held consensus in the Western church that marriage is to be seen as an ecclesial sacrament. This article examines some of the impact of this momentous move on the Christian understanding of marriage. It suggests the need for Protestants to recover, in fuller measure, the sacramentality of marriage, in other words, an affirmation that the outward and visible marriage between a man and woman carries inward and spiritual significance. The article proposes a way this might be done, utilizing John Wesley’s understanding of the “means of grace.” Our hope is that a more robust Protestant view of marriage will contribute more fully to the ongoing discussion on the subject among the various sectors of Christianity and result in the blessing of the church and the world, especially the church in Asia, where sacramentality is inherent in the Asian worldview.


Author(s):  
Nicola Clark

Throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, the Howards are usually described as religiously ‘conservative’, resisting the reformist impulse of the Reformation while conforming to the royal supremacy over the Church. The women of the family have played little part in this characterization, yet they too lived through the earliest stages of the Reformation. This chapter shows that what we see is not a family following the lead of its patriarch in religious matters at this early stage of the Reformation, but that this did not stop them maintaining strong kinship relations across the shifting religious spectrum.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.


1995 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-94
Author(s):  
Wendel W. Meyer

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a major rift within the ranks of English Catholicism. Following the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850, the Ultramontanes began to consolidate their hold on the channels of ecclesiastical authority. Led by the flamboyant Nicholas Wiseman, they began to dominate the newly established English Catholic hierarchy, supported in their efforts by a tide of Irish immigrants, a reservoir of talented and dedicated priests trained at the English College in Rome and a wave of Oxford converts who, in the wake of the Gorham case, thirsted for a fount of unswerving ecclesiastical authority. The domination of the Ultramontanes, both in England and on the continent, meant that Liberal Catholicism was decidedly on the defensive, seeking to combat a rising tide of intellectual and scientific. intolerance. The period from mid-century until the promulgation of the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 was a crucial one in this struggle for intellectual autonomy. It was marked by several events which placed the emerging concepts and theories of scientific inquiry in direct conflict with the authority of the Church as is most sharply demonstrated in the convoluted and intense debate which came to be focused upon an ancient Christian artifact, the ampolle di sangue or the phials of blood.


2019 ◽  
pp. 40-61
Author(s):  
Martin Pugh

This chapter focuses on the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Following Henry VIII's break with Rome in 1531, the English Reformation led Britain into a protracted struggle with the two great Catholic powers, Spain and France, for the next 300 years. The long-term effect was to define Britain as the leading Protestant power; but more immediately, it posed a far greater threat to England than Islam, and effectively destroyed the rationale for crusading activities. In this situation, the Islamic empires actually became a valuable balancing factor in European diplomacy. Henry's readiness to deal with the Muslim powers was far from eccentric during the sixteenth century. Both King Francis I of France and Queen Elizabeth I of England took the policy of collaboration much further.


1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Elliott

At the Reformation, three possibilities faced English Catholics. They could continue to be Catholics and so suffer the penalties of the penal laws; they could conform to the Church of England; or they could adopt a middle course and become Church Papists. The Nevills of Nevill Holt, near Market Harborough in Leicestershire, went through all three phases. In the reign of Edward VI, Thomas Nevill I became a Protestant. His grandson, Thomas Nevill II, became a Church Papist under James I; and Thomas II’s son, Henry Nevill I, continued to be one at the time of the Civil War. But Henry l’s son William was definitely a Catholic and went into exile with King James II, while William’s son, Henry Nevill II, was an open Catholic under Charles II. Henry Nevill II’s descendants continued to be Catholics throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until they left Nevill Holt in the late nineteenth century.


Ritið ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 255-288
Author(s):  
Hjalti Hugason

n 2017 the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation was celebrated. Then there was a huge discussion about the impact of the Reformation on church, culture and society. In this article and in a second one that follows, this question will be raised, especially in Icelandic context.Here it is assumed that it is only possible to state that a change has occurred or a novelty has arised because of Lutheran influence if it can be demonstrated that the Reformation is a necessary prerequisite for the change / innovation being discussed. Here it is particularly pointed out that various changes that until now have been traced to the Reformation can have been due to the development of the central-con-trolled state power. It is also pointed out that, due to the small population, rural areas and simple social structure, various changes that occurred in urban areas did not succeed in Iceland until long after the Reformation. Such cases are interpret-ed as delayed Lutheran effects. Then, in Iceland, many changes, which were well matched to the core areas of the Reformation, did not work until the 18th century and then because of the pietism. Such cases are interpreted as derivative Lutheran effects.In Iceland two generalizations have been evident in the debate on the influence of the Lutheran Reformation. The first one emphasizes an extensive and radical changes in many areas in the Reformation period and subsequent extensive decline. It is also stated that this regression can be traced directly to the Reformation and not to other fenomenons, e.g. the development of modern, centralized state. The other one states that the Reformation was most powerful in the modernization in both the church and society in Iceland.This article focuses on the influence of the Reformation on religious and church life. Despite the fact that the Reformation has certainly had the broadest and most direct effects on this field, it is noteworthy that the church organization itself was only scarsely affected by the Reformation. After the Reformation the Icelandic church was for example almost as clergy-orientaded as in the middle Ages.


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