Answering “the Known Men”: Bishop Reginald Pecock and Mr. Richard Hooker

1980 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-146
Author(s):  
Charles W. Brockwell
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Legal Instrument ◽  
Reginald Pecock ◽  
Established Church

There are both striking similarities and significant differences between the Lollards of the fifteenth century and the radical Puritans of the sixteenth. Both rejected the authority of the established church in England, and both suffered for such boldness. With the passage of De heretico comburendo in 1401 the so-called Wycliffites were liable to inquisitorial proceedings and punishments. Lollards were now felons as well as heretics. In 1406, by means of a supplement to the 1401 legislation, the laymen in Parliament at last took heed of the warning from the churchmen that confiscation of church possessions threatened all lordship, secular as well as spiritual. Under a constitution drafted at the Oxford Assembly from November to December, 1407 and republished at St. Paul's in 1409, any preacher other than a priest in his own parish was required to obtain a license from the ordinary or the archbishop in order to preach. Arundel further decreed that such preachers were to speak only on the subjects set forth in Peckham's constitution, Ignorantia sacerdotum. As the chief legal instrument of this English Inquisition, De heretico comburendo remained in effect until set aside by Henry VIII. It was later revived by Mary, and finally repealed by Elizabeth.

Early Tudor Poetry: Courtliness and Print

2019 ◽  
pp. 257-284
Author(s):  
Derek Attridge
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Impact

After noting the evidence for the public performance of poetry in Continental Europe, this chapter turns to the impact of print on English poetry: from the late fifteenth century, the printers Caxton and de Worde gave readers a new way to experience poems. At the court of Henry VIII, Skelton exploited both manuscript and print. The Devonshire manuscript, which circulated around Henry’s courtiers, is discussed, as is Tottel’s 1557 Songes and Sonettes, whose cachet lay partly in its making the private poetry of the elite available to a large public. Another popular collection was A Mirror for Magistrates, in which a gathering of poets impersonating famous tragic victims of the past was staged. Although there were signs of a suppler use of metre, the 1560s and 1570s were characterized by highly regular verse. The most skilled poet of this period, Gascoigne, was also responsible for a pathbreaking treatise on poetry.

scholarly journals Pecock’s Mismigrations across the Religious Field

2019 ◽  
Vol 99 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 371-386
Author(s):  
Ian Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Reginald Pecock

Abstract In mid-fifteenth-century England, the anti-Lollard Bishop of Chichester Reginald Pecock managed to get himself convicted for heresy in the very act of trying to teach orthodox doctrine to the laity. His remarkable array of interlocking treatises recodified the entirety of Christian doctrine and catechetics in a sprawling multitextual summa that endeavoured to forge its own new communities of interpretation. Pecock’s textual mismigrations reveal much about the perils of social change and stasis that they attempt to address through the intent to reform. Although the laity of this time was successful in procuring more challenging devotional and theological materials, Pecock’s bid to bestow on them a newly enhanced theological and philosophical role was a step too far. So what can be extrapolated from his failure? What do his frustrated texts tell us about the dynamics, permeability, and (non-)negotiability of religious boundaries in mid-fifteenth-century England?

The Earliest Original English Seaman's Rutter and Pilot's Chart

1961 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 409-431
Author(s):  
Alwyn Ruddock
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Great Book ◽  
Early History ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
History Of ◽  
End To End ◽  
History Of Navigation

This article reports the discovery of two documents of considerable interest in the early history of navigation in England. When Henry VIII was planning to send ships of the royal fleet to Harderwijk in Guelderland in 1539, no pilot's book or chart of this part of the coast of northern Europe could be found in England. Therefore two experienced shipmasters, John Aborough of Devon and Richard Couche of Dover, were sent in haste to the Low Countries to make a survey of the coast and chart the route the king's ships would have to follow. Working with speed and secrecy, they compiled and brought back to the king a rutter giving sailing directions for Zeegat van Texel and the Zuider Zee and also a rough chart showing in detail the channels through the Haaks Banks, the entry to Marsdiep and the channel from thence to Enkhuizen. These two documents are the earliest original examples of such navigational directions drawn up by Englishmen which have so far been discovered. Both are reproduced in full and discussed in detail in this study.Among the Marquess of Salisbury's family archives at Hatfield House is a document of great interest in the early history of navigation in England. It is a seaman's rutter giving directions for the navigation of Zeegat van Texel and the Zuider Zee which was compiled by two English shipmasters in 1539 on direct orders from King Henry VIII. A narrow roll of manuscript fashioned by roughly sewing four strips of parchment end to end, being not quite 6 in. wide and nearly 3½. long when fully opened out, this appears to be the earliest original English rutter which can be found today. It is true that the well-known set of fifteenth-century ‘Sailing Directions’ published by the Hakluyt Society in 1889 were compiled at an earlier date. But these have only survived in a copy transcribed by a professional scribe, William Ebesham, among a number of treatises on heraldry, chivalry and similar matters contained in a volume called the Great Book, part of the library of a country gentleman of East Anglia, Sir John Paston. The parchment roll at Hatfield would appear, therefore, to be the earliest example of an original English rutter which has yet been discovered.

Wyclif and the Independence of the Church in England

1923 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 131-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Alva Gifford
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Society ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right ◽  
John Wyclif ◽  
The Church ◽  
Better Than

I was moved to investigate the subject of this study by an admiration of long standing for John Wyclif, and by the feeling that James Gairdner, the latest historian of Lollardy, had done scant justice to the religious movement that began with Wyclif, and that survived through a century and a half to lend powerful aid to Henry VIII, when the hour struck for the rejection of the Roman jurisdiction. When the work was finished, I found myself at a goal not far removed from that of Dr. Gairdner, although I had reached it with less reluctant feet. Dr. Gairdner had the spirit of the true archivist.1 He had no aversion to dust; he could endure even dirt; but disorder, never. And Lollardy, in English society in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, was a source of disorder. I do not revolt at disorder when great changes are necessary. Unlike Dr. Gairdner, I can find great uses for the man who “refused to recant or bow to the opinion of trained judges,” even though they “presumably understood such questions better than himself.” I cannot view the literature of Lollardy, admittedly crude, as “poisonous.” And I respectfully dissent from the view that an admission of the right of sects to exist is “fatal to the essence of Christianity itself.” But I have found ever increasing reason to concur in the conclusion to which Dr. Gairdner's unrivalled knowledge led him, viz., that Lollardy survived through the troubled days of the fifteenth century to “help Henry VIII put down the Pope,” that Henry's reformation of the Church was “precisely on Lollard lines,” and that “Lollardy affected the Church more and more after his death.”

English Reformation

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stella Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Royal Supremacy ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Church ◽  
Political Decisions

Fifteenth-century England was solidly Catholic, 17th-century England predominantly Protestant: the difference between them constituted the English Reformation. Scholarly opinion is divided about the nature of the changes that happened in the 16th century, the rate at which they occurred in town and country and from region to region, and whether they came about because of a series of political decisions imposed “from above” by the Tudor monarchs from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I or as the expression of popular religious fervor welling up “from below.” Henry’s reign (1509–1547) witnessed the formal break with Rome, the declaration of royal supremacy over the church in England, and the plundering of the nation’s monastic wealth, but official promotion of more overt expressions of Protestantism had to wait for the brief reign of Edward VI (1547–1553). Mary I (reigned 1553–1558) reversed the policies of her father and brother, thereby placing England at the forefront of Catholic attempts to stem the Protestant tide. The long reign of Elizabeth (1558–1603) witnessed the emergence of an Anglican via media between the Catholic and Puritan extremes on the English ecclesiastical spectrum.

Chasing the Lady

2019 ◽  
pp. 422-441
Author(s):  
Paul Williams
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

Responding to intellectual, devotional and liturgical changes in the rest of Europe, the place of the Virgin Mary was reappraised in England during the Reformations of the sixteenth century. It was during a seventeen year period between the publication of the Litany in English under Henry VIII in 1544 and the revised Calendar of the 1559 Prayer Book under Elizabeth in 1561 that a liturgical ‘shape’ to a reformed understanding of the Virgin Mary’s place within worship of the established church was formed. It provided a basis for an ‘Anglican’ theology of Mary, subsequent devotion and liturgical developments in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion.

‘Where ruine must reforme’?

2019 ◽  
pp. 132-164
Author(s):  
Stewart Mottram
Keyword(s):  
Status Quo ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Status ◽  
Established Church

Chapter 4 sets John Denham’s response to the renovation of St Paul’s Cathedral in light of widening religious divisions among English protestants in the 1630s and early 1640s, reading Denham’s Coopers Hill (1642) alongside Denham’s other works from 1641–2, including his play, The Sophy. The chapter establishes that Denham’s ‘anger’, in Coopers Hill, at the monastic dissolutions under Henry VIII is best interpreted in light of Denham’s reaction to the threatened dissolution of cathedrals under reforms proposed by the Long Parliament in 1641. Denham’s anger at the monastic dissolutions has been dubbed Laudian, even ‘anti-Protestant’, but the chapter argues that his reaction is in fact a characteristically protestant response to the excesses of reformation iconoclasm, as first practised under Henry VIII, and, in the early 1640s, under Long Parliament presbyterianism. The chapter roots Denham’s pity for the monasteries within an English reformation tradition—stretching back through Herbert to Spenser—that was at once anti-catholic and anti-iconoclastic, and it shows how Denham’s praise for Laud’s cathedral restorations is derived from his understanding of the Caroline church as the rightful heir of the sobrieties of the Elizabethan religious settlement, as this settlement had been lauded by Spenser, Herbert, and other writers before him. Denham therefore uses ruined abbeys and restored cathedrals to represent two possible futures for the established church, at once celebrating the status quo and demonstrating the ease by which the violence of the early reformation could turn inwards, against the edifice of English protestantism that Laud had laboured to restore.

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