religon and the decline of magic

7/21/2019 Religon and the Decline of Magic

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PENGUIN BOOKS

RELIGION AND THE DECLINE OF MAGIC

ith Thomas is President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford and a former President e British Academy. He was previously Professor of Modern History and Fellow of Shn's College. He has written extensively on the social and intellectual history of thrly modern period. He is the general editor of the Past Masters series (Oxfordniversity Press) and of Oxford Studies in Social History(Clarendon Press).Religion ae Decline of Magic, his first book, won one of the two Wolfson Literary Awards forstory in 1972. He is the author ofMan and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes ingland 15001800, which is also published in Penguin, and the editor of The Oxfordok of Work(1999). He was knighted in 1988 for services to the study of history.


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RELIGION AND THE DECLINE OF MAGIC

STUDIES IN POPULAR BELIEFS IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURYENGLAND

KEITH THOMAS

PENGUIN BOOKS


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PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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First published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1971

Published in Penguin University Books 1973

Reissued in Peregrine Books 1978

Reprinted in Penguin Books 1991

16

Copyright Keith Thomas, 1971

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of tradeherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of bi

cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being impon the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193240-8
http://www.penguin.com/


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To my parents


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CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Table of Abbreviations

PROLOGUE

The EnvironmentRELIGION

The Magic of theMedieval ChurchThe Impact of the ReformationProvidencePrayer and ProphecyReligionand the People

MAGIC

Magical HealingCunning Men and Popular MagicMagic and Religion

ASTROLOGY

Astrology: its Practice andExtent

Astrology: its Social and Intellectual RoleAstrology and Religion

THE APPEAL TO THE PAST

Ancient Prophecies

WITCHCRAFT

Witchcraft in England: the Crime and its History

Witchcraft and ReligionThe Making of a WitchWitchcraft and its Social EnvironmentWitchcraft: Decline

ALLIED BELIEFS

Ghosts and FairiesTimes and Omens

CONCLUSION


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FOREWORD

ISbook began as an attempt to make sense of some of the systems of belief which

ere current in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, but which no longer enuch recognition today. Astrology, witchcraft, magical healing, divination, ancientophecies, ghosts and fairies, are now all rightly disdained by intelligent persons. Bey were taken seriously by equally intelligent persons in the past, and it is the

torian's business to explain why this was so. I have tried to show their importancee lives of our ancestors and the practical utility which they often possessed. In thissk I have been much helped by the studies made by modern social anthropologistsmilar beliefs held in Africa and elsewhere.

As my work progressed, I became conscious of the close relationship which many ese beliefs bore to the religious ideas of the period. In offering an explanation forsfortune, and a means of redress at times of adversity, they seemed to be discharg

role very close to that of the established Church and its rivals. Sometimes they werrasitic upon Christian teaching; sometimes they were in sharp rivalry to it. I theredened my scope, so as to make room for a fuller consideration of this aspect ofntemporary religion. By juxtaposing it to the other, less esteemed, systems of beliepe to have thrown more light on both, and to have contributed to our knowledge e mental climate of early modern England. I have also tried to explore theationship between this climate and the material environment more generally.

The result, inevitably, is a very long book. Even so, I am well aware of thempressions and over-simplifications which have resulted from handling so manyfferent topics over so long a period of time. But I am anxious to bring out the

terrelated nature of these various beliefs and can only do this by treating themgether. The book is arranged so that the reader who wishes to skip some of thections can easily do so, but the whole is meant to be more than the sum of its parto wish to emphasize the essential unity of the period between the Reformation ane dawn of the Enlightenment. This is why the book begins with the collapse of theedieval Church in the early sixteenth century and ends with the change in thetellectual atmosphere which is so striking in the years approaching 1700. The souro indicate a halt at the end of the seventeeenth century, since the records of both

d church courts cease around that time to be so informative on the matters with wm concerned.

Few of the topics under consideration are peculiarly English; indeed most of themrm part of the general cultural history of the Western world. But this survey has beictly limited to England (with occasional excursions into Wales) and I have resistee temptation to draw parallels with Scotland, Ireland, and the continent of Europeercise in comparative history, however desirable, is not possible until the data forch country have been properly assembled. As it is, I have only skimmed the surface English material and have blurred some important regional distinctions.

I particularly regret not having been able to offer more of those exact statistical d


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on which the precise analysis of historical change must so often depend.nfortunately, the sources seldom permit such computation, although it is to be hopat the information contained in the largely unpublished judicial records of the timll one day be systematically quantified. My visits to these widely scattered archiveve been less frequent and less systematic than I should have liked. In my attempt etch the main outlines of the subject I have only too often had to fall back upon thstorian's traditional method of presentation by example and counter-example.though this technique has some advantages, the computer has made it the intellectuivalent of the bow and arrow in a nuclear age. But one cannot use the computerless one has suitable material with which to supply it, and at present there seems no genuinely scientific method of measuring changes in the thinking of past

nerations. As a result, there are many points in my argument at which the reader given no statistical evidence on which to accept or reject the impressions I have

rmed after my reading in contemporary sources. But I have been pleased to see thfar as the subject of witchcraft is concerned, my impressions have been abundantnfirmed by the statistical findings of Dr Alan Macfarlane, whose systematic study

tchcraft prosecutions in Essex, one of the counties for which the evidence permits operation, has now been published.*My main aim has been to draw attention to ge and relatively neglected area of the past. I shall be well satisfied if future

storians succeed in replacing my tentative generalizations by a more adequate verthe truth.

Foreword to the Penguin Edition

r this edition I have corrected some errors, pruned a few extravagances and addedndful of additional references to the footnotes, mainly to take account of recentblications. I am most grateful to friends, correspondents and reviewers for theirggestions.

June 1972


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

many people have supplied me with ideas or information that I cannot hope to liem all here. I have tried to acknowledge specific obligations in the notes and I offologies for any which have been unintentionally omitted. My greatest intellectualbts are to my former tutors at Balliol College and to my past and present pupils ahn's. I am particularly grateful to Dr Christopher Hill, who kindled my interest in

venteenth century and did so much to guide my early ventures into it. I must alsoank those of my friends, notably Mr Richard Grassby, Dr Brian Harrison and Dr Joalsh, who have for years sent me stray references to subjects which they thoughtould interest me. Many stimulating conversations with Dr Alan Macfarlane havelped me to clarify my own ideas. Parts of this book have been read as papers andctures in this country and abroad, and I have tried to benefit from the resultingticisms.

The chapters on witchcraft and popular magic include most of the material (and mthe wording) of my two BBC talks on Witches and Wizards (reprinted in the

tener, 5 and 12 March 1970), and of my paper to the Association of Socialnthropologists on The Relevance of Social Anthropology to the Historical Study ofglish Witchcraft (in Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, ed. M. Douglas, ASAonograph 9, Tavistock Press, 1970). Of those who gave me references and pieces oformation I am especially indebted to Dr Philip Tyler, who provided some valuablformation relating to the diocese of York; Miss Elizabeth Allen, who gave me someferences to the Peterborough diocesan archives; and Mr F. C. Morgan, who both mpossible for me to work in Hereford Cathedral Library and also let me borrow and

ote from his transcripts of the Hereford City Records. For permission to quote fromeir unpublished theses I am grateful to Dr J. Addy, Dr M. Bindoff, Dr Macfarlane, ale, Dr J. A. F. Thomson and Dr R. B. Walker. I also wish to thank Dr B. S. Capp, A. Houlbrooke, Mr J. A. Sharpe and Mr P. A. Slack.

I have received much help from the many archivists and librarians who have enabe to consult documents in their custody or provided me with photocopies. I must those in charge of the County Record Offices of Cheshire, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset,sex, Glamorgan, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Ipswich and East Suffolk, Kent,

ncashire, London, Middlesex, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Somerset and Yorkshireast Riding). I am also grateful to the City Librarians of Birmingham, Gloucester aneffield, the Archivist at the Leicester City Museum, the custodians of the boroughchives of Bridport and Lyme Regis, and the staffs of Lambeth Palace Library, Drlliams's Library, Reading University Library, the Oxford Museum of the History ofience, the Guildhall Library, the British Museum and the Public Record Office. I amrticularly indebted to Mrs N. K. Gurney of the Borthwick Institute of Historicalsearch, Mrs D. M. Owen of the Cambridge University Library, Mr H. L. Douch of tyal Institution of Cornwall and Mr E. H. Milligan, Librarian at Friends House.

cuments quoted from the Public Record Office are Crown Copyright.


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In Oxford my work has been greatly eased by Mr Charles Morgenstern of St John'sllege Library, Mr G. Webb of the Codrington Library, and the endlessly helpful anerant staff of the Bodleian, for whose many kindnesses I am deeply grateful. Myllege has been generous with leave and with help towards the cost of typing theanuscript. My wife has helped me most of all.

John's College, Oxford

July 1970


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NOTES ON REFERENCES

Enotes are so numerous that I have dispensed with a formal bibliography. The rea

ho wishes to follow up any aspect of the subject can draw upon the notes themselvwell as the brief bibliographical notes which introduce each main section.sthetically, it would have been better to cut down the volume of documentation, buld not do so without making it impossible for the reader to identify the sources u

hich statements in the text are founded. I have, however, made extensive use ofbreviations. These are listed in the accompanying Table of Abbreviations. Otherwe full title and details of publication have been given for every source on its firstation in the notes to each chapter; thereafter a shortened title has been employedeek and Hebrew titles have generally been omitted. Unless otherwise stated, the ppublication is London. In most quotations from contemporary sources the spellingd punctuation have been modernized.


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ABBREVIATIONS

dd. Additional

dyT. Ady,A Candle in the Dark(1656); reprinted, with same paginationA Perfect Discovery of Witches(1661)

P.C. Acts of the Privy Council

chaeol. Archaeologicalhm. Ashmole MSS (Bodleian Library)

ubrey,Gentilisme

J. Aubrey,Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, ed. J. Britten (Folk-LSoc., 1881)

ubrey,Miscellanies

J. Aubrey,Miscellanies upon Various Subjects(4th edn, 1857)

acon, Works The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Hea(18579)

rnard,Guide

R. Bernard,A Guide to Grand-Iury Men(1627)

M. British Museum, London

odl. Bodleian Library, Oxford

orthwick Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York

and,Antiquities

J. Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, reviseby Sir H. Ellis (Bohn edn, 184955)

ull. Bulletin

urton,Anatomy

R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy(1621) (Everyman edn, 1932)

alvin,

nstitutes

J. Calvin,Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. H. Beveridge (1957

B. Court Book

S.P.D. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series

ooper,Mystery

T. Cooper, The Mystery of Witchcraft(1617)

U.L. Cambridge University Library

N.B. Dictionary of National Biography


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ale,Precedents

extending from the year 1475 to 1640; extracted from Act-Books ofEcclesiastical Courts in the Diocese of London(1847)

ereford CityRecords

Bound volumes of transcripts of the records of the City of Hereford mby F. C. Morgan, Esq., and in his possession

eywood,Diaries

The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B.A., 16301702; his Autobiography, Diaries,Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. Horsfall Turner (Brighouse and Bing18825)

M.C.Homilies

Historical Manuscripts Commission, Reports The Two Books of Homiliesappointed to be read in churches, ed. J. Griffiths (Oxford, 1859)

sten,Ashmole

Elias Ashmole (161792). His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, hisCorrespondence, and other Contemporary Sources relating to his Life andWork, ed. with a biographical introduction, by C. H. Josten (Oxford,1966)

urn. Journal

ttredge,Witchcraft

G. L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England(1929: reprint, NewYork, 1956)

ocher,Science andReligion

P.H. Kocher,Science and Religion in Elizabethan England(San Marino,Calif., 1953)

mbeth Lambeth Palace Library

a,MaterialsLib. Materials towards a History of Witchcraft, collected by H. C. Lea, ed. AHowland (Philadelphia, 1939) Library

lly,Autobiography

William Lilly's History of his Life and Times from the year 1602 to 1681,written by Himself(1715), reprint, 1822

ly, ChristianAstrology

W. Lilly, Christian Astrology Modestly Treated of in Three Books(1647)

P.Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the reign of Henry VIII, ed. J

Brewer et al(18621932)alleus Malleus Maleficarum, trans. M. Summers (1948)

urray,Erceldoune

The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. J. A. H. Mur(E.E.T.S., 1875)

otestein,Witchcraft

W. Notestein,A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718(19reprint, New York, 1965)

E.D.

A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. J. A. H. Murray(Oxford, 18881933)


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xf. Univ.Arch. Oxford University Archives (Bodleian Library)

rkins,Discourse

W. Perkins,A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft(Cambridge,1608)

ottsPotts's Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster 1613, ed. J.Crossley (Chetham Soc., 1845)

owicke andCheney,Councils andSynods

Councils and Synods, ii (A.D. 12051313), ed. F. M. Powicke and C. RCheney (Orford, 1964)

R.O. Public Record Office

ocs. Proceedings

S. Parker Societyv. Review

O. Record Office (Archives Office in the case of Kent)

obbins,Encyclopedia

R. H. Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology(1960)

rum ManualManuale ad Usum Percelebris Ecclesie Sarisburiensis, ed. A. JefferiesCollins (Henry Bradshaw Soc., 1960)

ot,Discoverie

R. Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft(1584) (The best modern edition by B. Nicholson [1886]. The most recent (by H. R. Williamson, [1964has been siently abbreviated)

oane Sloane MSS (British Museum)

c. Society

mers TractsA Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts of the late Lord Somers, 2n

edn, by W. Scott (180915)uthwell Act

BooksTranscript of Southwell Minster Act Books by W. A. James (ReadingUniversity Library [942.52])

T.C.A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave,A Short-title Catalogue of Books prinin England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books printed abroad , 141640 (1926; reprint, 1956)

aylor,

Mathematical

E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart Eng(Cambridge, 1954)


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Practitionershiers,Superstitions

J.-B. Thiers, Trait des Superstitions qui regardent les sacremens(1679;edn, Paris, 1741)

homson,Later Lollards

J. A. F. Thomson, The Later Lollards, 14141520(Oxford, 1965)

horndike,Magic and

Science

L. Thorndike,A History of Magic and Experimental Science(New York:Morningside Heights, 192358)

ans. Transactions

R.H.S. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

urner,Providences

W. Turner,A Compleat History of the Most Remarkable Providences, BoJudgment and Mercy, which have hapned in this Present Age(1697)

C.H. Victoria County History

ing D. Wing,Short-title Catalogue of Books printed in England, Scotland, IreWales and British America, and of English Books printed in Other Countr16411700(New York, 194551)

ood,Ath. OxA. Wood,Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (Oxford 181320)

ood,Life andTimes

The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, antiquary, of Oxford, 163295, edClark (Oxford Hist. Soc., 18911900)

orkDepositions

Depositions from the Castle of York, relating to offences committed in the

Northern Counties in the seventeenth century, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Soc1861)

ork ManualManuale e t Processionale ad Usum Insignis Ecclesiae Eboracensis, ed. WHenderson (Surtees Soc., 1875)


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r this is man's nature, that where he is persuaded that there is the power to bringosperity and adversity, there will he worship.

orge Gifford,A Discourse of the Subtill Practices of Devilles by Witches and Sorcerers587), sigs.B4v-C1


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PROLOGUE

1.

THE ENVIRONMENT*

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England was still a pre-industrial society,

any of its essential features closely resembled those of the under-developed areasday. The population was relatively sparse: there were perhaps two and a half millople in England and Wales in 1500, and five and a half million in 1700. Even in ter seventeenth century the economy gave little indication of the industrialization

hich was to come. It is true that there was now a highly commercialized agriculturgorous textile industry, a substantial production of coal and a growing volume of

lonial trade. But the bulk of the population was still engaged in the production ofod, and the development of capitalist organization was still rudimentary. There ww factories. The typical unit of production was the small workshop, and cottagedustry was still the basis of textile manufacture.

Most of the population lived in the countryside. Gregory King, the pioneer statistiwhom we owe most of our figures for this period, calculated that in 1688 nearly

ghty per cent of the population lived in villages and hamlets. Most of the urban arere very small; Birmingham, Bristol, Exeter, Newcastle, Norwich and York were th

ly provincial cities with more than ten thousand inhabitants. Norwich, the largestese, had about thirty thousand. The one striking exception to this pattern of life inattered rural communities was the capitalcity. London's population multiplied tenring these centuries; by 1700 it was well over half a million and still growing. It hen estimated that perhaps a sixth of the total population spent at least part of thees in this great metropolis, many of them returning to their rural communities witwly acquired urban habits of living.1

Society was highly stratified and the contrast between rich and poor was everywh

nspicuous. Gregory King calculated that in 1688 over half the population wereecreasing the wealth of the kingdom, that is to say earning less than they consumere can be no doubt that between a third and a half of the population lived atbsistence level and were chronically under-employed. These were the cottagers,upers, labouring people and outservants, as King called them. Many of these werpy-holders occupying their own small tenements, but even more were wage labour the decline of the English peasantry was already under way. Above them came tore prosperous classes of farmers, freeholders and tradesmen. At the top was theaditional lite of landed gentry and nobility, now strongly challenged by the rising

ofessional groups, lawyers, clergymen, merchants and officials. King estimated th


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e landowners and professional classes, though only five per cent of the populationjoyed a larger proportion of the national income than did all the lower classes (ovty per cent) put together.

Conditions of life varied so much among these different elements of the populatioat it is hard for the historian not to be struck more by the differences than by themilarities. Tudor and Stuart England may have been an under-developed society,pendent upon the labours of an under-nourished and ignorant population, but it a

oduced one of the greatest literary cultures ever known and witnessed anprecedented ferment of scientific and intellectual activity. Not every under-develociety has its Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, Wren and Newton. The social lite wasghly educated. It has been calculated that by 1660 there was a grammar school forery 4,400 persons, and that two and a half per cent of the relevant age-group of tale population was receiving some form of higher education, at Oxford andmbridge, or at the Inns of Court. The latter is a higher figure than any attained agtil after the First World War.2It was an age of immense creative activity in the fiedrama, poetry, prose, architecture, theology, mathematics, physics, chemistry,

story, philology and many other learned disciplines. Yet it was also a time when age, but as yet unknown, proportion of the population (perhaps between half and rds of adult males in the mid seventeenth century) was unable to read, or at least

gned with a mark.3

It is this huge variation in standard of living, educational level and intellectualnsibility which makes this society so diverse, and therefore so hard to generalizeout. Not only did conditions change over the two centuries, but at any one point i

me there were so many different layers of belief and levels in sophistication. The

vention of the printed word, moreover, had made possible the preservation andssemination of many different systems of thought, deriving from other societies anmetimes dating from the remote classical past. The task of the historian is thusfinitely harder than that of the social anthropologist, studying a small homogeneommunity in which all inhabitants share the same beliefs, and where few of thoseliefs are borrowed from other societies. This was no simple unified primitive worldt a dynamic and infinitely various society, where social and intellectual change hang been at work and where currents were moving in many different directions.

The beliefs with which this book is concerned had a variety of social and intellectuplications. But one of their central features was a preoccupation with the explanad relief of human misfortune. There can be no doubt that this concern reflected thzards of an intensely insecure environment. This is not to suggest that it was theszards which brought the beliefs into being. On the contrary, most of the latter haden inherited from earlier generations and therefore preceded the society in which urished. Nevertheless, there were certain features of the sixteenth- and seventeentntury environment by which they could hardly fail to be coloured.

Of these the first was the expectation of life. Systematic demographic research upo


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e history of England during these two centuries has only just begun, and theadequacies of the evidence probably mean that our knowledge of the health andysical condition of contemporaries will always be incomplete. But it is beyond disat Tudor and Stuart Englishmen were, by our standards, exceedingly liable to painkness and premature death. Even among the nobility, whose chances are likely tove been better than those of other classes, the life expectation at birth of boys bore third quarter of the seventeenth century was 29.6 years. Today it would be aroun. A third of these aristocratic infants died before the age of five, while the level ofortality among those who lived to be adults closely resembled that of India in the cade of the nineteenth century.4In London, conditions were particularly bad. Theglish demographer, John Graunt, estimated in 1662 that, of every hundred liveildren born in the metropolis, thirty-six died in their first six years and a furtherenty-four in the following ten years. He calculated the expectation at birth to be lan that which was to be the figure for India during the influenza pandemic of 191.5Graunt's estimate may have been unduly pessimistic. In any case he lived at a t

hen the mortality rate was untypically high. In the mid sixteenth century the

pectation at birth may have been as high as 40-45, for country folk anyway.6Butntemporaries did not need elaborate demographic investigations to tell them that as short, and that the odds were against any individual living out his full span. Wall find more who have died within thirty or thirty-five years of age than passed itmarked a writer in 1635.7Even those who survived could anticipate a lifetime oftermittent pain. Literary sources suggest that many persons suffered chronically frme ailment or other, and this impression is confirmed by inferences from what isown of contemporary diet.

The food supply was always precarious and throughout the period the fate of thenual harvest remained crucial. The meagre evidence available suggests that the yitio on seed corn may have doubled between 1500 and 1660, but so did the populaout one harvest in six seems to have been a total failure, and mortality could soar

hen times of dearth coincided with (or perhaps occasioned) large-scale epidemics.8

e seventeenth century, however, it was rare, but certainly not unknown, for men te in the streets from starvation or exposure.9Yet even at times of plenty most peoem to have suffered from a lack of Vitamin A (yellow and green vegetables) andtamin D (milk and eggs). The first of these deficiencies accounts for the numerous

mplaints of sore eyes' (xerophthalmia), the second for the widespread incidence okets. Scorbutic diseases were also common. The well-known green sickness in yo

omen, to which contemporaries gave a sexual meaning, was chlorosis, anaemiaoduced by a lack of iron in the diet, stemming from upper-class disdain for freshgetables. The well-to-do ate too much meat and were frequently constipated. Theyt regard milk as a drink for adults and they frequently suffered from the infectione urinary tract which produced the notorious Stuart malady of stone in the bladdee dietary deficiencies of the lower classes, by contrast, reflected not so much

norance as simple poverty. Not until the nineteenth century did labourers get enou


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eat and butter. In the seventeenth century they may have escaped the gout and stohich plagued their betters, and may even have had better teeth from eating moregetables. But they were chronically under-nourished and vulnerable to tuberculosid gastric upsets (griping in the guts) caused by bad food.10Rich and poor alike wctims of the infections generated by the lack of hygiene, ignorance of antiseptics asence of effective sanitation. Epidemics accounted for thirty per cent of reportedaths in seventeenth-century London. There were periodic waves of influenza, typhsentery and, in the seventeenth century, smallpox, a disease which the contemporysician Thomas Sydenham assumed would sooner or later attack most people. Thousand people died of smallpox in London between 1670 and 1689; and a study owspaper advertisements printed in theLondon Gazette between 1667 and 1774 shat sixteen out of every hundred missing persons whose descriptions were given bockmarks on their faces.11

Most dreaded of all was the bubonic plague, which was endemic until the last quathe seventeenth century. It was a disease of the towns and it particularly affectedor, who lived in crowded, filthy conditions, thus attracting the black rats, which a

wadays thought to have carried the fleas which spread the disease. (Like the peopdia today, the poorer classes in parts of seventeenth-century England still used cowng as fuel.12) In the hundred and fifty years before the great visitation of 1665 the

ere only a dozen years when London was free from plague. Some people were thohave died of it every year and periodically there were massive outbreaks, althoug

any of the deaths which contemporaries attributed to plague probably occurred foher reasons. In 1563 some 20,000 Londoners are thought to have died; in 1593,,000; in 1603, 30,000, or over a sixth of the inhabitants; in 1625, 41,000, another

th; in 1636, 10,000; and, in 1665, at least 68,000. In provincial towns plague deametimes took away an even higher proportion of the population.13

The plague terrified by its suddenness, its virulence and its social effects. The uppasses would emigrate temporarily from the afflicted area, leaving the poor to die.nemployment, food shortage, looting and violence usually resulted. The refugeesemselves were liable to receive rough treatment from country folk, frightened theyere bringing the disease with them. Further violence accompanied popular resistanthe quarantine regulations and restrictions on movement imposed by the authoritrticularly to the practice of shutting up the infected and their families in their houe plague, said a preacher, was of all diseases,

most dreadful and terrible; then all friends leave us, then a man or woman sit(s) and lie(s) alone and is a strangbreath of his own relations. If a man be sick of a fever it is some comfort that he can take a bed-staff and knock, a

vant comes up and helps him with a cordial. But if a man be sick of the plague then he sits and lies all alone.14

When a Western traveller visits a pre-industrial society of this kind today he equipmself with all the resources of modern medicine; he takes pills to keep his stomache from infection and is vaccinated against smallpox, and inoculated against typhu

ague or yellow fever. No such immunity was available to the inhabitants of Tudor


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uart England, for medical science was helpless before most contemporary hazardsalth. There was an organised medical profession, but it had little to offer. In theteenth and early seventeenth centuries university-educated physicians were givenrely academic training in the principles of humoral physiology as set out in the wHippocrates, Aristotle and Galen. They were taught that illness sprang from anbalance between the four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile).agnosis consisted in establishing which of these humours was out of line, and thertaking steps to restore the balance, either by bloodletting (by venesection,

arification or applying leeches) or by subjecting the patient to a course of purges ametics. The physician thus followed a dreary round of blood-letting and purging, al

th the prescription of plasters, ointments and potions. He focused on what we shogard as the symptoms of disease fever or dysentery rather than the disease itsee patient's urine was taken to be the best guide to his condition, and there were soactitioners who even thought it enough to see the urine without the patient, thouge Royal College of Physicians condemned this habit.15It was just as well that in strlenic theory one of the humours was bound to predominate unnaturally, so that

rfect health was almost by definition unattainable.16

In the seventeenth century, accordingly, doctors were quite unable to diagnose orat most contemporary illnesses. Many diseases they cannot cure at all, declaredbert Burton, as apoplexy, epilepsy, stone, strangury, gout, quartan agues; ammon ague sometimes stumbles them all.17Internal medicine had to wait upon thw development of physiology and anatomy. There were no X-rays and nothoscopes, and a physician was usually quite ignorant of what was actually going

side a sick person's body. There were surgeons who dealt with tumours, ulcers,

ctures and venereal disease. But their art was regarded as an inferior one by theysicians. Besides, without anaesthetics or knowledge of antiseptics, there was verytle they could do. Operations were largely confined to amputations, trepanning thull, cutting for stone, bone-setting and incising abscesses. Patients werederstandably terrified of undergoing this kind of torture and the mortality rate afch operations was high. Richard Wiseman's standardSeverall Chirurgicall Treatises676) was popularly known as Wiseman's Book of Martyrs.18

Nowhere was the inadequacy of contemporary medical technique more apparent tits handling of the threat presented by the plague. A few physicians noticed that rme out of their holes at times of plague,19but they did not associate them with thesease; indeed, by urging that cats and dogs be killed in order to check infection, thay have actually worsened the situation. Contemporaries preferred to attribute plaa combination of noxious vapours in the air and corrupt humours in the body, thoey disagreed about the causes of these phenomena and about whether or not thesease was contagious. As a preacher bluntly said in 1603, Whence it cometh, wherariseth and wherefore it is sent they confess their ignorance.20All sorts of amuld preservatives were recommended tobacco, arsenic, quicksilver, dried toads. M

ergy was also devoted to finding some means of allaying popular panic, on the


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sumption that the happy man would not get plague. As a further preventive, theysicians prescribed better hygiene, which was sensible enough, and the locking upfected parties within their own houses, which was less sensible, since by confiningher members of the family to the habitat of the rats they must have increased the tdeaths. No progress had been made in the study of plague by the time of the greaitation of London in 1665. It is a mysterious disease, confessed the current Secrethe Royal Society, and I am afraid will remain so, for all the observations and

scourses made of it.21

Yet the failure of contemporary doctors to offer an adequate therapy for this or mher contemporary diseases did not matter very much to most of the population. Thentions of a qualified physician were effectively beyond their reach, because ther

as a severely limited supply of trained men. The Royal College of Physicians had bt up in 1518 to supervise and license physicians practising in the City of London athin a seven-mile radius. The College seems to have exercised this monopoly in a

alous and restrictive way, for it kept its numbers small, despite an immensebsequent increase in the size of the City. In the first years of its foundation the Co

d only a dozen members, whereas London's population was perhaps sixty thousan1589 the College's membership had risen to thirty-eight while the population had

ore than doubled. Thereafter the number of inhabitants continued to riseectacularly, but the size of the College remained almost stationary until the Civil Wriod. The number of Fellows was raised to forty in 1663 and the College expandedrther in the later Stuart period. But the ratio of the London population to its resideembers and licentiates can never have been less than five thousand to one and waually very much greater.22

In the provinces, where the licensing powers exercised by the College were never portant as those of the Church and Universities, the situation was rather better. Tmber of country physicians rose steadily through the period. One modern student mpiled a list of 814 physicians who are known to have been licensed between 160d 1643.23It shows that some towns were relatively well supplied with qualifiedctors. Norwich had seventeen, Canterbury twenty-two, Exeter thirteen and York t

ot all these may have actually practised, but the list itself is an under-estimate, sint all the records of the period have survived. By the end of the seventeenth centurere can have been few market-towns without a resident physician. Richard Baxternconformist divine, who tells us he was very seldom without pain, was able as aung man to consult no fewer than thirty-six different physicians.24

Physicians, however, were too expensive for the bottom half of the population, evough they often tailored their bills to fit the pockets of their clients. In the sevententury a gentleman could expect to be charged about a pound a day for medicalendance, but humbler persons might get off for a few shillings if the doctor was s

sposed.25Nevertheless, there were many complaints that it was only the wealthy wuld regularly afford a physician. Physic, declared Bishop Latimer in 1552, is a

medy prepared only for rich folks and not for poor; for the poor man is not able to


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age the physician. At the end of the seventeenth century Richard Baxter wrote thaany a thousand lie sick and die that have not money for physicians: even frugaleholders of twenty or thirty pounds a year had difficulty in finding ten shillings

ve their lives in cases of danger.26The Royal College of Physicians in 1687 ruled teir members should give free advice to the poor and soon afterwards set up a shored Dispensary to sell medicine at cost price. This step angered the apothecariesrocers-cum-drug-sellers) and did not solve the problem.27Parishes were expected ty medical fees for their paupers and some municipalities appointed town doctors,t the provision of a state medical service was urged only by utopian thinkers. Oneem, John Bellers, declared in 1714 that half the people who died annually sufferedom curable diseases, for which only their poverty prevented them from finding amedy.29

In lieu of the physicians, patients could turn to the surgeons and apothecaries.venty-two surgeons were licensed to practise in London in 1514, while in 1634 thothecaries were thought to number at least a hundred and fifty. By 1701 there wed to be a thousand in London and a further fifteen hundred apprentices. They

tnumbered the physicians by five to one.30The apothecaries thus took on the task agnosing and prescribing the medicine as well as supplying it. The physicians resis incursion into their territory and the seventeenth century witnessed a protracted

gal battle which did not end until 1704, when the apothecaries right to give medicvice (though not to charge for it) was upheld by the House of Lords. But they had gaged in general practice in the provinces, where distinctions between themselved the physicians and surgeons had been less rigid, while in London they claimed tndling ninety-five per cent of medical practice before the end of the seventeenth

ntury.31

After 1704 their evolution into the modern general practitioner was assuror was their treatment necessarily inferior to that offered by the physicians. On thntrary, the very size of their clientele forced them into prescribing new drugs, of and frowned upon by the Royal College, in place of the time-consuming humoralmedies.32

But the impact of organized medicine upon the lower reaches of the population wdom more than superficial. Many of the poor chose to go outside the ranks of theensed practitioners altogether, and to consult an empiric, herbalist, wise woman, her member of that great multitude of ignorant persons whose practice of physicrgery had been denounced by Parliament in 1512. In 15423 another Act had alloyone with the necessary knowledge to treat external sores and prescribe for the stcording to a pamphleteer in 1669, there was scarce a pissing-place about the City

hich was not adorned by posters advertising the services of some medical quack.33

me of the nostrums thus peddled reflected genuine country lore about herbs and rohers did the patient severe or even fatal damage.34

But this was above all a time when medicine began at home. Every housewife hadpertoire of private remedies. All the nation are already physicians, remarked

cholas Culpepper in 1649. If you ail anything, every one you meet, whether a ma


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oman, will prescribe you a medicine for it. None practise physic or professethdwifery, reported the villagers of Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, in 1662, butaritably one neighbour helps one another.35In childbirth, indeed, a physician wasver employed, save by the very wealthy, or in cases of unusual emergency. There shortage of midwives, licensed and unlicensed, but their qualifications were

dimentary. The forceps had been invented by Peter Chamberlen early in theventeenth century, but he kept it secret and the usual obstetric tools were cruel anefficient. A midwife estimated in 1687 that two thirds of contemporary abortions,llbirths, and deaths in child-bed were to be attributed to the lack of care and skillsplayed by her colleagues.36The wife of one Newark apothecary was so afraid of adwife coming near her that her husband used to lock her alone in her room until tlivery was over.37

As for hospitals, St. Bartholomew's and St. Thomas's were the only two for theysically ill in London at the end of the seventeenth century and there were fewewhere. They were in any case meant primarily for the poor. No person of socialetensions would dream of entering one as a patient; and if he did he would certain

increasing his chances of contracting some fatal infection.Even less could be done for sufferers from mental illness. Contemporary medicalerapy was primarily addressed to the ailments of the body. For the diseases of thend, wrote Robert Burton, we take no notice of them. Raving psychotics were locby their relatives, kept under guard by parish officers, or sent to houses of

rrection.38Less dramatic forms of mental illness were regarded either as cases ofelancholy to be treated by purging and blood-letting, or wrongly diagnosed asysteria, stemming from a condition of the uterus. The uterine origin of nervous

seases was not successfully challenged in England until the later seventeenth centuhen Thomas Willis formulated the theory of the cerebral origin of hysteria andoneered the science of neurology.39

There was thus no orthodox medical agency which offered a satisfactory cure forental illness. Various low-grade practitioners took out licences as curers of mad fod distracted persons, and some of them maintained private madhouses. Yet eventhlem Hospital (Bedlam) in London discharged its inmates as incurable if they hadcovered within a year.40It is not surprising that supernatural explanations of menpression were advanced or that the main psychotherapists were the clergy. Physicone was not enough to cure melancholy, declared the Puritan oracle, Williamrkins.41

These were the circumstances in which so many unorthodox methods of healingjoyed prestige. The population at large disliked Galenic physic for its nauseousmedies,42and were frightened by the prospect of surgery. Some of the most intelliymen of the day expressed total contempt for conventional medicine; and theorthodox empirics hounded by the Royal College of Physicians often turned out tove influential champions.43King James I regarded academic medicine as mere

njecture and therefore useless. Francis Bacon thought that empirics and old wome


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ere more happy many times in their cures than learned physicians. Robert Burtonchbishop Abbot, and many less notable contemporaries, said the same. Some sciend intellectuals followed the example of Paracelsus and were prepared to learn frorbalists and wise women.44Thomas Hobbes, who took a keen interest in the problsurvival, concluded that he would rather have the advice or take physic from anperienced old woman that had been at many sick people's bedsides, than from thearnedst but unexperienced physician.45Doctors of physic, thought the sectary,dowick Muggleton, were the greatest cheats in the world. If there were never actor of physic in the world, people would live longer and liver better in health.46

Before discounting such lay opinions we should recall that even Thomas Sydenhame greatest physician of the seventeenth century, thought that it would have beentter for many patients if the art of physic had never been invented, remarking thaany poor men owed their lives to their inability to afford conventional treatment.or was he alone among his colleagues in holding such opinions. I have heard thearned and pious Dr. Ridgeley, M.D., say, recalled John Aubrey, that if the world kn

e villainy and knavery (beside ignorance) of the physicians and apothecaries, the

ople would throw stones at 'em as they walked in the streets.48

Helplessness in the face of disease was an essential element in the background to liefs with which we shall be concerned. So too was vulnerability to other kinds ofsfortune, particularly when it came suddenly. Next to plague, perhaps the greates

ngle threat to security was fire. This was more of a risk in the sixteenth andventeenth centuries than it is today and contemporaries were much less well-equipdeal with it. The towns were particularly vulnerable with their thatched roofs,

ooden chimneys and crowded living conditions. Since there were no safety matcheople often chose to fetch a bucket of burning coals from a neighbour rather thanaste time struggling with a tinder-box. At night they were dependent on candles,hich, when set down in a draughty place, could easily put a house on fire. Fearndle, good wife, warned the agricultural writer, Thomas Tusser, Fear candle in hft, in barn and in shed. When the chimney needed cleaning it was common to takort cut by firing a gun up it or even setting it on fire: this was how the Beccles fireas started in 1586, with eighty houses burned down as a result.49A further risk camom the numerous industrial workshops, scattered among the houses, and observing

ost rudimentary safety precautions. Dyers, brewers and soapboilers were a constanurce of danger: the fire which did 200,000-worth of damage at Tiverton in 1612gan when a dyer's furnace was allowed to become overheated.50

Some of the biggest conflagrations were the result of carelessness engendered byimitive living conditions. A hundred and fifty buildings were damaged at Woburn 95 after an old woman had set her thatched house alight by throwing all her used aw on the fire. Tiverton was heavily damaged in 1598 when a fire was started byme beggar-women who had been pathetically trying to cook pancakes on straw

cause they could not afford to buy wood. Much of Northampton was destroyed in


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75 when a woman left her pot of washing on the fire for too long. Most of the PalWhitehall was burned down in 1698 because a Dutch washerwoman tried to hastee drying of her linen by lighting a charcoal fire indoors.51

Once fire had broken out it seldom encountered much in the way of effectivesistance. Fire-fighting techniques were virtually unchanged in England between thorman Conquest and the death of Elizabeth I.52Even the most advanced municipalssessed nothing more in the way of equipment than some leather buckets, a few

dders and iron hooks for pulling down thatch so as to stop the fire spreading. Untid seventeenth century there were no engines to project water to a height, and theater supply itself was usually unreliable. Some towns required householders to keeckets of water outside their doors. Others tried to check the erection of woodenildings and thatched roofs. This had been the official policy of the City of London

nce the twelfth century. But such regulations were easier to make than to enforce, e fire-fighting equipment usually proved sadly inadequate when the blaze was unday. There were no fire brigades, and the scene at a fire was usually one of unrelievaos. The only effective way contemporaries knew of stopping a fire was to blow u

the buildings around it to stop it spreading. When the flames dwindled there wasvariably trouble with pilferers.53

Unable to prevent the outbreak of fire, and virtually helpless during the actualnflagration, contemporaries showed little more resource when it came to bearing s. There was no organised fire insurance until the last two decades of the sevententury. All that the victim of fire could do was to apply for a Church brief, authoriscollection to be made on his behalf in places of public worship. These begging lettere issued for a variety of charitable purposes and were as unreliable as modern fl

ys. Nor was their prestige enhanced by the numerous petty frauds which grew aroem. But they help us to form some estimate of the actual scale of fire damage. Theow, for example, that in the last fifty years of the seventeenth century there wereghty-nine separate fires in which the damage incurred was estimated at 1,000 orore: the total cost of this group of large fires was put at 913,416.54In assessing thure we should recall that it excludes the Great Fire of London (1666), which did llions of damage, destroying over 13,000 houses, and leaving perhaps 100,000 pemeless.55It also excludes numerous smaller fires, as well as those for which no recs survived, or for which no brief was issued. All this, moreover, took place at a tim

hen fire-fighting methods had begun to improve; in the sixteenth century the situatas worse.

As a purely economic factor, therefore, fire was exceedingly important. But its humnsequences are even more obvious, for there was no occurrence which so graphicambolized the instability of human fortunes. He which at one o'clock was worth fivousand pounds and, as the prophet saith, drank his wine in bowls of fine silver plad not by two o'clock so much as a wooden dish left to eat his meat in, nor a housever his sorrowful head.56The briefs which were read aloud in the churches on Sun

rved as a constant reminder of how men could be reduced in an instant from weal


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ter penury, and how there was no telling whose turn it might be next. Theychological threat was increased by the capriciousness of the danger. Some townscaped serious fire; whereas others suffered again and again. Tiverton was burnedwn three times (1598, 1612, 1731). Marlborough, Blandford, Dorchester andaminster all suffered repeatedly. Warwick and Northampton had only one seriousch, but in both cases it destroyed a large part of the town. Ip the metropolis fires common that when the great fire in 1666 began scarcely anyone outside itsmediate vicinity took any notice.57

Poverty, sickness, and sudden disaster were thus familiar features of the socialvironment of this period. But we must not make the anachronistic mistake ofsuming that contemporaries were as daunted by them as we should be, were weddenly pitchforked backwards in time. In Tudor and Stuart England men were fulcustomed to disease and a low expectation of life. Parents were slower to recognise individuality of their children, for they well knew that they might lose them in thfancy. Husbands and wives were better adjusted to the idea of the surviving partn

arrying after the other's death. The attitude of the poor to their lot seems often to en one of careless stoicism. Many middle-class observers commented on theirsensibility in face of the dangers of the plague, and were shocked by the generaluctance to obey regulations designed for their own safety.58When starvationreatened, the poor were capable of using violence to secure food for themselves, bey made little contribution to the political radicalism of the time and showed noterest in attempting to change the structure of the society in which they foundemselves. Unlike the inhabitants of today's under-developed countries, they knew foreign countries where the standard of living was notably higher. Instead of

orking for social reform they often turned to more direct methods of liberation.

Drink, for example, was built into the fabric of social life. It played a part in nearery public and private ceremony, every commercial bargain, every craft ritual, evivate occasion of mourning or rejoicing. At fairs and markets, which remained exetil 1874 from ordinary licensing restrictions, the consumption could be enormous.t to the town's end where a fair is kept, remarked a preacher in 1638, and there , as if some field had been fought; here lies one man, there another. As a Frenchmserved in 1672, there was no business which could be done in England without po

er.59Late medieval preachers complained that working-men got drunk at least onceek; while in the reign of Charles II foreign visitors noticed that artisans did not ley go by without a visit to the alehouse.60

The beer was cheap to make. The Elizabethan country clergyman, William Harrisod 200 gallons brewed every month in his household, for an outlay of only twentyillings a time.61We do not know the size of his household, but the daily consumptias obviously high. At sea and on land the standard allowance of beer per head seehave been a gallon a day.62Beer was a basic ingredient in everyone's diet, childre

ell as adults. The first available figures for the total national consumption date fro


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e late seventeenth century. They show that in 1684 duty was charged in England aales on a total of 6,318,000 barrels of beer (4,384,000 of strong beer, 1,934,000 o

mall beer), each barrel containing thirty-six gallons in London, and thirty-four in thovinces. This suggests that each member of the population, man, woman and childnsumed almost forty gallons a year, i.e. nearly a pint a day. But allowance must amade for the beer brewed privately on which excise was not charged: Gregory Ki

timated that in 1688 this came to a further seventy per cent of the original total. Ethout this addition theper capitaconsumption figure is higher than anything knowodern times.63And this is to take no account of the foreign wine imports or theowing volume of spirit consumption.

It may be that the greater quantity of salt meat and fish consumed in the seventeentury made men thirstier. It is also likely that the listlessness produced by aedominantly cereal diet created a greater demand for a stimulant. The absence ofernative beverages further helped to drive men to alcohol. Tea and coffee were stxuries. Tea cost twenty shillings a pound at the end of the seventeenth century64ad not establish itself as a working-class drink until the last quarter of the eighteent

ntury. Coffee played an even slighter part in the drinking habits of the populationge, though it became very fashionable among London sophisticates.

Alcohol was thus an essential narcotic which anaesthetized men against the strainntemporary life. Drunkenness broke down social distinctions, and brought amporary mood of optimism to the desperate. It was extensive in Elizabethan prisod among the lower classes. (It was only during the seventeenth century that the loplaced the beggar as proverbially the drunkest member of the community.) 66Theor took to drink to blot out some of the horror in their lives. Alcohol flowed freely

mes of plague: I have myself seen, recalled a preacher in 1638, when the Bills [ofortality] were at the highest, even bearers who had little respite from carrying dearpses to their graves and many others of the like rank go reeling in the streets.67Aecutions drink was always offered to the condemned: the witch, Anne Bodenham, as executed at Salisbury in 1653, kept asking for drink and would have died drunkr persecutors had allowed her.68Ale, wrote a contemporary,

h comfort the heavy and troubled mind; it will make a weeping widow laugh and forget sorrow for her deceasedband; it is the warmest lining of a naked man's coat; it satiates and assuages hunger and cold; with a toast it is tr man's comfort; the shepherd, mower, ploughman, and blacksmith's most esteemed purchase; it is the tinker's

asure, the pedlar's jewel, the beggar's joy; and the prisoner's loving nurse.69

a means of making life appear momentarily tolerable, drink had few rivals amone very poor. There was more good in a cask of ale than in the four gospels, declareteenth-century heretic; malt, he thought, did more to justify God's ways to man the Bible.70

A newer form of narcotic was tobacco. Smoking was introduced to England early e reign of Elizabeth I and had become well-established by the time of her death. At

st there was an attempt to represent tobacco as being taken only for medicinal


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rposes, but the pretence soon became unconvincing. In 1597 a contemporarymarked that addicts were consuming it for wantonness and cannot forbear it, nt in the middest of their dinner. Jacobean observers were familiar with the chain

moker who puffed his pipe from morning to night, and even in bed.71Tis death tome to be barred tobacco, declared a Member of Parliament in 1621.72Yet pipe-

moking was an expensive habit. Tobacco varied widely in price according to thepply, but it seldom sold for less than a pound per pound in the reign of James I, aen cost more. Figures for domestic consumption are spasmodic, but they indicate ady rise, from an annual average of 140,000 pounds in 161421 to 11,300,000unds in 16991709. This suggests that the consumption per head of population wefrom less than an ounce a year at the beginning of the century to nearly two pouthe end. Not until 1907 did the figures reach this level again.73Tobacco must havene something to steady the nerves of Stuart Englishmen. One modern historian haggested, not entirely frivolously, that it helped to foster the virtues of politicalmpromise which emerged in the later seventeenth century. Holy Communion, thoristopher Marlowe, would have been much better being administered in a tobacc

pe.74

A further escape from reality was gambling. In modern times the prospect of winnortune on the football pools attracts millions of people and sustains the optimismany working-class folk in adverse circumstances. In the seventeenth century gambverted the attention of the labouring poor from the possibilities of self-help andlitical activism, by holding out the prospect that a lucky person would be able totter himself despite the inequities of the social system. Men gambled on cards, dicrses, foot-races, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, and a host of similar pastimes. Even v

or men engaged heavily in speculative ventures; and the judicial records of the timntain occasional references to labourers who were unable to support their wives aildren because they had lost all their money at cards.75In 1663 Samuel Pepys was

mazed to see ordinary working-folk losing as much as ten or twenty pounds on beaiting and cock-fighting.76

These were the habits which generations of middle-class reformers attempted to brtheir successive campaigns for the Reformation of Manners, by battling againstpular pastimes, superfluous alehouses and lower-class tippling. What they werembating was the fatalistic hopelessness of those who saw no alternative but to droeir sorrows. The beliefs to which we must now turn were all concerned to explainsfortune and to mitigate its rigour. But we must not forget that some contemporaeferred recourse to cruder and more immediate forms of escape.


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RELIGION

2.

THE MAGIC OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH*

Surely, if a man will but take a view of all Popery, he shall easily see that a great part of it is mere magic.

William Perkins,A Golden Chaine(159(inWorkes[Cambridge, 161618], i, p. 4

ARLYevery primitive religion is regarded by its adherents as a medium for obtaini

pernatural power. This does not prevent it from functioning as a system ofplanation, a source of moral injunctions, a symbol of social order, or a route tomortality; but it does mean that it also offers the prospect of a supernatural meanntrol over man's earthly environment. The history of early Christianity offers noception to this rule. Conversions to the new religion, whether in the time of theimitive Church or under the auspices of the missionaries of more recent times, havquently been assisted by the view of converts that they are acquiring not just a mother-worldly salvation, but a new and more powerful magic. Just as the Hebrewiests of the Old Testament endeavoured to confound the devotees of Baal byallenging them publicly to perform supernatural acts, so the Apostles of the earlyurch attracted followers by working miracles and performing supernatural cures.

e New Testament and the literature of the patristic period testify to the importancese activities in the work of conversion; and the ability to perform miracles sooncame an indispensable test of sanctity. The claim to supernatural power was ansential element in the Anglo-Saxon Church's fight against paganism, and missionad not fail to stress the superiority of Christian prayers to heathen charms.1

The medieval Church thus found itself saddled with the tradition that the working racles was the most efficacious means of demonstrating its monopoly of the truthe twelfth and thirteenth centuries theLivesof the Saints had assumed a stereotype

ttern. They related the miraculous achievements of holy men, and stressed how thuld prophesy the future, control the weather, provide protection against fire andod, magically transport heavy objects, and bring relief to the sick. Many of these

ories were retold in The Golden Legend, a popular compilation by a thirteenth-centchbishop of Genoa, which was to be translated by Caxton in 1483 and reissued ingland at least seven times before the Reformation.2

On the eve of the Reformation the Church did not as an institution claim the poweork miracles. But it reaped prestige from the doings of those of its members to whod was deemed to have extended miraculous gifts. It stressed that the saints were o

tercessors whose entreaties might go unheeded, but it readily countenanced the


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numerable prayers offered to them on more optimistic assumptions. The shrines onts at Glastonbury, Lindisfarne, Walsingham, Canterbury, Westminster, St Albansd similar holy places had become objects of pilgrimage to which the sick and infirade long and weary journeys in the confident expectation of obtaining a supernatre. Over 500 miracles were associated with Becket and his shrine; and at the Holyod of Bromholm in Norfolk thirty-nine persons were said to have been raised fromad and twelve cured of blindness. Holy relics became wonder-working fetishes,lieved to have the power to cure illness and to protect against danger; around 142e Bishop of Durham's accounts contain a payment for signing sixteen cattle with Slfrid's signet to ward off the murrain.3

Images were similarly credited with miraculous efficacy. The representation of Stristopher, which so frequently adorned the walls of English village churches, was offer a day's preservation from illness or death to all those who looked upon it. Stlgerfort, better known as St Uncumber, whose statue stood in St Paul's, couldminate the husbands of those discontented wives who chose to offer her a peck ofts. The large mounted wooden figure of Derfel Gadarn at Llandderfel, near Bala,

otected men and cattle, rescued souls from Purgatory, and inflicted disease upon hemies: Henry VIII's visitors found five or six hundred worshippers at the shrine ony they went there to pull it down.4Saints indeed were believed to have the powerstow diseases as well as to relieve them. We worship saints for fear, wrote Williandale in the early sixteenth century, lest they should be displeased and angry witd plague us or hurt us; as who is not afraid of St Laurence? Who dare deny St

nthony a fleece of wool for fear of his terrible fire, or lest he send the pox among oeep?5

The worship of saints was an integral part of the fabric of medieval society and wstained by important social considerations. Individual churches had their own patnts, and strong territorial associations could give hagiolatry an almost totemicaracter: Of all Our Ladies, says a character in one of Thomas More's writings, I lst Our Lady of Walsingham, and I, saith the other, Our Lady of Ipswich. 6

grims brought money into the community and the inhabitants grew dependent upem: in Elizabethan times, for example, it was pointed out that St Wistan's church iicestershire had previously been maintained by the proceeds of the annualgrimage.7Every medieval trade had the patronage of its own especial saint, who rporately worshipped, and whose holy day had strong occupational affiliations:

r painters had Luke, our weavers had Steven, our millers had Arnold, our tailors had Goodman, our sowters [cobbCrispin, our potters had S. Gore with a devil on his shoulder and a pot in his hand. Was there a better horseleech

n S. Loy? Or a better sowgelder than S. Anthony? Or a better toothdrawer than S. Apolline?

ginald Scot could thus mock these occupational saints in the years after theformation, but his words reveal the depth of the social roots of this form of populvotion. The patronage of the saints give a sense of identity and of corporate exist

small and otherwise undifferentiated institutions. Hence their enduring popularity


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mes for colleges and schools even in a Protestant era.

Local loyalties could thus sustain an individual's allegiance to a particular saint. Be worship of saints in general depended upon the belief that the holy men and wothe past had not merely exemplified an ideal code of moral conduct, but could sti

mploy supernatural powers to relieve the adversities of their followers upon earth.seases, like occupations and localities, were assigned to the special care of anpropriate saint, for in the popular mind the saints were usually regarded as specia

ther than as general practitioners. S. John and S. Valentine excelled at the fallingil, recalled Scot,

Roch was good at the plague, S. Petronill at the ague. As for S. Margaret she passed Lucina for a midwife, in whpect S. Marpurge is joined with her in commission. For madmen and such as are possessed with devils, S. Romaneellent, and friar Ruffine was also prettily skilful in that art. For botches and biles, Cosmus and Damian; S. Clare fo

s. S. Apolline for teeth, S. Job for the pox. And for sore breasts S. Agatha.8

e saints were always on call to deal with a variety of daily eventualities. Pregnanomen could use holy relics girdles, skirts and coats kept for the purpose by manigious houses, and they were urged by midwives to call upon St Margaret or thergin Mary to reduce the pangs of labour, or to invoke St Felicitas if they wished tosure that the new child would be a boy. Henry VII's queen paid 6s. 8d. to a monk dle of Our Lady for use in childbirth.9The variety of other secular contexts in whints could also be invoked is indicated by John Aubrey's nostalgic description of thrt they had once played in the daily lives of the Wiltshire country folk:

St Oswaldsdown and Fordedown, &c thereabout, the shepherds prayed at night and at morning to St Oswald (thatrtyred there) to preserve their sheep safe in the fold When they went to bed they did rake up their fire and makss in the ashes and pray to God and St Osyth to deliver them from fire and from water and from all misadventure

en the bread was put into the oven, they prayed to God and to St Stephen, to send them a just batch and an even.1

e impetus behind the worship of saints seems to have slackened considerably durie fifteenth century.11But until the Reformation miracles at holy shrines continued reported. In 1538 a Sussex parson was still advising his parishioners to cure theirimals by making offerings to St Loy and St Anthony.

The powers popularly attributed to the saints were, however, only one particular

stance of the general power which the medieval Church, in its role as dispenser ofvine grace, claimed to be able to exercise. By the early Middle Ages the ecclesiasticthorities had developed a comprehensive range of formulae designed to draw dowd's practical blessing upon secular activities. The basic ritual was the benediction t and water for the health of the body and the expulsion of evil spirits. But theurgical books of the time also contained rituals devised to bless houses, cattle, cropips, tools, armour, wells and kilns. There were formulae for blessing men who wereparing to set off on a journey, to fight a duel, to engage in battle or to move intow house. There were procedures for blessing the sick and for dealing with sterileimals, for driving away thunder and for making the marriage bed fruitful. Such ri


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ually involved the presence of a priest and the employment of holy water and thethe cross. Basic to the whole procedure was the idea of exorcism, the formal conjuthe devil out of some material object by the pronunciation of prayers and thevocation of God's name.13Holy water, thus exorcised, could be used to drive awayirits and pestilential vapours. It was a remedy against disease and sterility, and anstrument for blessing houses and food; though whether it worked automatically, orly if the officiating priest was of sufficient personal holiness, was a matter ofeological dispute.

Theologians did not claim that these procedures made the practical precautions ofily life superfluous, but they did undoubtedly regard them as possessing a powerhich was more than merely spiritual or symbolic. The formula for consecrating thely bread, given away to the laity on Sundays in lieu of the eucharist, called on Goess the bread, so that all who consume it shall receive health of body as well as oful.14It was regarded as a medicine for the sick and a preservative against the pla

As for holy water, there were some theologians who thought it superstitious to drina remedy for sickness or to scatter it on the fields for fertility; but the orthodox vi

mly based upon the words of the benediction, was that there was nothing impropout such actions, provided they were performed out of genuine Christian faith.15

riodically, therefore, the holy water carrier went round the parish so that the piouuld sprinkle their homes, their fields and their domestic animals. As late as 1543,hen a storm burst over Canterbury, the inhabitants ran to church for holy water torinkle in their houses, so as to drive away the evil spirits in the air, and to protecteir property against lightning. At about the same date the vicar of Bethersden, Kenuld advise a sick parishioner to drink holy water as a help to her recovery.16In th

venteenth century Jeremy Taylor lamented of the Irish that although not so muchicken is nowadays cured of the pip by holy water, yet upon all occasions they used the common people throw it upon children's cradles, and sick cows' horns, and uem that are blasted, and if they recover by any means, it is imputed to the holyater.17The Devil, it was agreed, was allergic to holy water, and wherever hisfluence was suspected it was an appropriate remedy. In the reign of Elizabeth I,dow Wiseman, later a Catholic martyr, threw holy water at her persecutor, Topcl

hose horse thereupon flung him to the ground. Topcliffe raged against her, callingold witch, who by her charms had made his horse to lay him on the ground, but

elates the Catholic source for this episode] she with good reason laughed to see thaly water had given him so fine a fall.18Here, as Protestant commentators were toge, the distinction between magic and religion was an impossibly fine one.

The same was true of the numerous ecclesiastical talismans and amulets whose usurch encouraged. As one Protestant versifier wrote:

About these Catholics' necks and hands are always hanging charms, That serve against all miseries and all unhapp

harms.19


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eologians held that there was no superstition about wearing a piece of paper oredal inscribed with verses from the gospels or with the sign of the cross, provided n-Christian symbols were also employed.20The most common of these amulets wae agnus dei, a small wax cake, originally made out of paschal candles and blessed e Pope, bearing the image of the lamb and flag. This was intended to serve as afence against the assaults of the Devil and as a preservative against thunder,htning, fire, drowning, death in child-bed and similar dangers. After the Reformatshop Hall commented on the survival of the associated belief in the protective powSt John's Gospel, printed in a small roundel and sold to the credulous ignorants ws fond warrant, that whosoever carries it about with him shall be free from thengers of the day's mishaps.21In the seventeenth century rosaries were similarlyessed as a protection against fire, tempest, fever and evil spirits.22

The same preservative power was attributed to holy relics: in 1591, for example, Jlyn, an Oxford recusant, was said to possess a quantity of Christ's blood, which hetwenty pounds a drop: those who had it about them would be free from bodilyrm.23The sign of the cross was also employed to ward off evil spirits and other

ngers. In North Wales it was reported in 1589 that people still crossed themselveshen they shut their windows, when they left their cattle, and when they went out oeir houses in the morning. If any misfortune befell them or their animals theirmmon saying was You have not crossed yourself well today, or You have not mae sign of the rood upon the cattle, on the assumption that this omission had been use of their mishap.24

Ecclesiastical preservatives of this kind were intended to give protection in a wideriety of contexts. The consecration of church bells made them efficacious against e

irits and hence enabled them to dispel the thunder and lightning for which demonere believed to be responsible. When a tempest broke out the bells would be rung

effort to check the storm: this happened at Sandwich, for example, in the greatundering of 1502, and again in 1514.25Alternatively, one could invoke St Barbaraainst thunder, or tie a charm to the building one wished to protect though an agi failed to save St Albans Abbey from being struck by lightning in the thirteenthntury.26As a protection against fire there were St Agatha's letters, an inscriptionaced on tiles, bells or amulets. Fasting on St Mark's day was another means of gaiotection; or one could appeal to St Clement or to the Irish saint Columbkille.27In e holy shrine of St Werberga was carried round Chester and miraculously preservee city from destruction by fire.28In addition, there were exorcisms to make the fieltile; holy candles to protect farm animals; and formal curses to drive awayterpillars and rats and to kill weeds. At the dissolution of the Abbey of Bury Stmunds there were discovered relics for rain, and certain other superstitious usageoiding of weeds growing in corn.29

The medieval Church thus acted as a repository of supernatural power which couldspensed to the faithful to help them in their daily problems. It was inevitable that

iests, set apart from the rest of the community by their celibacy and ritual


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nsecration, should have derived an extra cachetfrom their position as mediatorstween man and God. It was also inevitable that around the Church, the clergy andeir holy apparatus there clustered a horde of popular superstitions, which endoweigious objects with a magical power to which theologians themselves had never la

aim. A scapular, or friar's coat, for example, was a coveted object to be worn as aeservative against pestilence or the ague, and even to be buried in as a short cut tvation: Bishop Hugh Latimer confessed that he used to think that if he became a fwould be impossible for him to be damned.30The church and churchyard also enjopecial power in popular estimation, primarily because of the ritual consecration oe site with salt and water. The key of the church door was said to be an efficaciousmedy against a mad dog;31the soil from the churchyard was credited with specialagical power; and any crime committed on holy ground became an altogether morinous affair, simply because of the place where it had occurred. This was recognisa statute of the reign of Edward VI imposing special penalties for such offences; i

nsecrated area were polluted by some crime of violence a special act of reconciliaas necessary before it could be used again for religious purposes.32Even the coins

e offertory were accredited with magical value; there were numerous popularperstitions about the magical value of communion silver as a cure for illness or acky charm against danger.

But it was above all in connection with the sacraments of the Church that such belose. The Mass, in particular, was associated with magical power and for this, it musaid, the teaching of the Church was at least indirectly responsible. During the lontory of the Christian Church the sacrament of the altar had undergone a process o

eological reinterpretation. By the later Middle Ages the general effect had been to

ift the emphasis away from the communion of the faithful, and to place it upon thrmal consecration of the elements by the priest. The ceremony thus acquired in thepular mind a mechanical efficacy in which the operative factor was not therticipation of the congregation, who had become virtual spectators, but the speciawer of the priest. Hence the doctrine that the laity could benefit from being presee celebration even though they could not understand the proceedings. If too ignorafollow a private mass book, they were encouraged to recite whatever prayers theyew; so that during the Mass the priest and people in fact pursued different modesvotion. The ritual was said, in a notorious phrase, to work like a charm upon an

der.33In the actual miracle of transubstantiation the instrumental cause was thermula of consecration. Theologians refined this doctrine considerably, but theirbtleties were too complicated to be understood by ordinary men.34What stood oute magical notion that the mere pronunciation of words in a ritual manner could echange in the character of material objects.

The reservation of the sacrament at the altar as an object of devotion had becomestomary in England by the thirteenth century and the element of mystery attachinwas enhanced by the construction in the later Middle Ages of enclosed sanctuaries

otect the elements from the gaze of the public. Literalism generated anecdotes of h


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e Host had turned into flesh and blood, even into a child.35The notion spread thatmporal benefits might be expected from its mere contemplation, and the belief wahanced by the readiness of the Church to multiply the secular occasions for whichasses might be performed as a means of propitiation. There were masses for the sid for women in labour, masses for good weather and for safe journeys, massesainst the plague and other epidemics. TheSarum Missalof 1532 contained a speciass for the avoidance of sudden death.36In 1516 the Priory of Holy Cross at Colcheceived a grant of land, in return for the celebration of a solemn mass for the furthosperity of the town.37It was common to attach special value to the performancertain number of masses in succession five, seven, nine or thirty (a trental). Theremony could even be perverted into a maleficent act by causing masses for the dbe celebrated for persons still alive, in order to hasten their demise. The fifteenthntury treatiseDives and Pauperinveighed against those

t for hate or wrath that they bear against any man or woman take away the clothes of the altar, and clothe the altaeful clothing, or beset the altar or the cross about with thorns, and withdraw light out of the church or do sing

equiem for them that be alive, in hope that they should fare the worse and the sooner die.38

e clear implication was that the clergy themselves were sometimes involved in therversions.

A plethora of sub-superstitions thus accumulated around the sacrament of the altae clergy's anxiety that none of the consecrated elements should be wasted orcidentally dropped on the floor encouraged the idea that the Host was an object opernatural potency. The officiating priest was required to swallow the remainingntents of the chalice, flies and all if need be, and to ensure that not a crumb of the

nsecrated wafer was left behind.39The communicant who did not swallow the bret carried it away from the church in his mouth, was widely believed to be inssession of an impressive source of magical power. He could use it to cure the bline feverish; he could carry it around with him as a general protection against illrtune, or he could beat it up into a powder and sprinkle it over his garden as a chaainst caterpillars. Medieval stories relate how the Host was profanely employed tot out fires, to cure swine fever, to fertilize the fields and to encourage bees to makney. The thief could also convert it into a love-charm or use it for some maleficen

rpose. Some believed that a criminal who swallowed the Host would be immune fscovery; others held that by simultaneously communicating with a woman one couin her affections.40In the sixteenth century John Bale complained that the Mass hcome a remedy for the diseases of man and beast. It was employed by witchesrcerers, charmers, enchanters, dreamers, soothsayers, necromancers, conjurers, crggers, devil-raisers, miracle-doers, dog-leeches and bawds. The first Edwardian Prok accordingly insisted that the bread should be placed by the officiating ministerrect in the communicant's mouth, because in past times people had often carried thcrament away and kept it with them and diversely abused it, to superstition and

ckedness.41


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It was because of this magical power thought to reside in consecrated objects thatclesiastical authorities had long found it necessary to take elaborate precautionsainst theft. The Lateran Council of 1215 had ruled that the eucharist and the holy ould be kept under lock and key, and the later medieval English Church showed aen interest in enforcing this stipulation. As late as 1557, for example, Cardinal Pohis Injunctions for Cambridge University, insisted that the font should be locked uas to prevent the theft of holy water.42Thefts of the Host are known to have occuriodically three were reported in London in 1532 and communion bread continbe employed illegitimately for magical purposes in the post-Reformation era: Jamvice, one of the Lancashire witches of 1612, was told by his grandmother, Oldmdike, to present himself for communion and bring home the bread.43

Many of these superstitions, however, did not require anything so dramatic as theeft of the Host from the altar. Mere attendance at Mass might secure temporalnefits. In hisInstructions for Parish PriestsJohn Myrc, the fourteenth-century Austinnon of Lilleshall, claimed the authority of St Augustine for the view that anyone ww a priest bearing the Host would not lack meat or drink for the rest of that day, n

in any danger of sudden death or blindness.44Thousands, wrote William Tyndale early sixteenth century, believed that, if they crossed themselves when the priestading St John's Gospel, no mischance would happen to them that day.45The Massuld also be a means of prognosticating the future or of gaining success in someojected venture. The clergy disseminated stories of the miraculous benefits which hen known to spring from communicating, and of the disastrous consequences whirticipation in the ceremony might have for the unworthy communicant.46In themmunion Service in the Prayer Book of 1549 the curate was required to warn the

ngregation that anyone who received unworthily did so to his own damnation, boiritual and temporal, for in this way we kindle God's wrath over us; we provoke hplague us with divers diseases and sundry kinds of death. In the seventeenth cente Catholic Church was noted by an intelligent observer to teach that the Mass migll be efficacious for safe-journeying by sea or land, on horseback or on foot; foromen that are barren, big, or bringing forth; for fevers and toothaches; for hogs anns; for recovery of lost goods and the like.47

Like the Mass, the other Christian sacraments all generated a corpus of parasitic

liefs, which attributed to each ceremony a material significance which the leaderse Church had never claimed. By the eve of the Reformation most of these rituals hcome crucial rites of passage, designed to ease an individual's transition from oncial state to another, to emphasise his new status and to secure divine blessing forptism, which signified the entry of the new-born child into membership of the Chu

as necessary to turn the infant into a full human being, and by the thirteenth centuas expected to take place within the first week of birth

religon and the decline of magic

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