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No 42: Lollardy Part 2 – Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

In Part I, we looked at the origins of Lollardy in the 1380s with John Wyclif in Oxford and at his radical proposals for a bible in English to provide the ordinary person with direct scriptural authority rather than having to follow blindly the teachings and traditions of the Catholic Church which he argued had become corrupted and unscriptural. Even the Pope should not be obeyed unless warranted by Scripture.  Modern Protestants would feel quite at home with his ideas, but they were then condemned as dangerously subversive and heretical.

foxes-martyrs

Original page heading 1.

The main source of information about the Lollards comes from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in Latin in 1559 and in English in 1563. John Foxe (1517-87) was ordained as an Anglican deacon in 1550 and fled from the Marian persecution of Protestants, spending the five years of Queen Mary’s reign in exile in Basle where he wrote most of the first edition of his great book. He protested against its popular title as ‘the Book of Martyrs’, because it was, in effect, a history of England interlaced with the history of the Christian Church from the earliest days. It included political history, lengthy accounts of events abroad, sermons and letters, theological disputes, anecdotes and jests, all in voluminous detail of over 4 million words, and grew in successive editions in his lifetime, occupying eight bulky volumes in the mid-Victorian edition, illustrated with 170 woodcuts.

His book was received with extravagant admiration and in 1571 it was ordered to be set up in every cathedral and in the houses of church dignitaries. Many parish churches had a copy, so we may well have had a copy in Penn. It was widely read for centuries. He recorded the Lollards and their Protestant successors as glorious martyrs, shining examples for the future. He used official documents and sought out invaluable written or oral testimony of first hand witnesses, including, as we shall see, one from Penn.

He spoke and wrote freely and frankly, showing both courage and industry and an enduring hatred of tyranny and cruelty, but it was hurriedly written and so not always accurate in detail, especially on dates, and was inevitably full of the grotesquely anti-catholic theological prejudices of his time.

© Miles Green, December 2006

1  “Acts and Monuments of Martyrs, with a General discourse of these latter Persecutions, horrible trouble and tumults, stirred up by Romish Prelates in the Church, with diverse other things incident, especially to this Realm of England and Scotland, as partly also to all other foreign nations”

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No 43: Lollardy Part 3 – Early Lollardy in the Chilterns

In Part I, we looked at the origins of Lollardy with John Wyclif in Oxford in the 1380s, and at his radical proposals for a bible in English to provide the ordinary person with direct scriptural authority . Part 2 discussed Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in 1559, the main source of information about Lollards.

It was not Wyclif’s intention to start a breakaway church, but one of his proposals had been to train ‘poor preachers’, ordinary laymen who would work with parish priests teaching and preaching. After he died, in 1384, itinerant preachers encouraged the rapid growth of Lollard groups meeting in houses to read the Bible and discuss their radical ideas.

The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was a recent and frightening memory and the authorities were alarmed. In 1401, a statute was passed by Parliament, de Haeretico Comburendo ‘Concerning the burning of heretics’, which empowered bishops to arrest, imprison and examine offenders and hand them over to the secular authorities to be burnt ‘in an high place’ before the people, if found guilty. However, recantations were, understandably many and only one man, a priest from Norfolk, suffered this penalty in the following decade. The 1401 Manor Court Rolls of Wycombe record that ‘John Dryvere doth not set up a cross upon his house’. Lollards believed that worship or reverence of the sign of the cross was committing idolatry.

In 1413, Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, the most important Lollard leader, was arrested and sentenced, but escaped from the Tower and organised a rising outside London in 1414, which was suppressed by the young Henry V in person. Oldcastle escaped, but was eventually recaptured and burnt at the stake in 1417. 39 others involved in the 1414 rebellion were hanged or burned five days later, and they included three men from Amersham and one from Missenden. The so-called Merciless Statute of 1414 ruled that those convicted of heresy forfeited all their possessions, but the King made a compassionate exception for these widows and children. 40 others were pardoned, five of whom were priests, and they included the Parson of Latimer, a fletcher from Wycombe Heath who used grey goose quills, a carpenter from Amersham and two men from Wycombe.

Amersham, Martyrs Memorial1

Wyclif was formally declared to be a heretic in 1415 and his bones were exhumed and burned in 1428. Large open gatherings were no longer attempted and the Wars of the Roses dominated the authorities’ attention.  The movement went largely underground, continuing to flourish for a further twenty or so years before gradually diminishing in numbers and importance, but still surviving. Evidence of Lollard sympathies around Penn is provided by the Vicar of Chesham, who was forced to recant of heresy in 1428, and the imprisonment for life of the parish priest of Hedgerley.

There was a small circle of landed proprietors in our part of the Chilterns, sympathetic to the Lollards in these early years and it may well be that this encouraged the unusual focus of Lollardy here. The will of the Lord of the Manor of Coleshill left several English bibles to Oxford University in 1457 and in the Bishop of Lincoln’s register four Amersham men recanted in 1462. Eleven heretics are recorded as having been burnt between 1401 and the accession of Henry VIII in 1485.  Foxe speaks of ‘a godly and great company’ of Lollards at Amersham, who had been meeting since at least 1495.

© Miles Green, February 2007

1 The Martyrs Memorial off Stanley Hill in Amersham commemorates the Lollard martyr William Tylsworth, burnt there in 1506, recorded in Foxes Book of Martyrs.

Continued in ‘Altar Arrangements in Penn Church

Continued in ‘Interesting Vicars of Penn

Continued in ‘Monuments and Memorials

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Rev. Carol Williams, Priest-in-Charge 1997-2001

Carol joined Holy Trinity in November 1997 as Priest in Charge and the comment above refers to her hobby of walking. Not only does she walk round the Parish and locality but on her holidays she is walking around the south westal coast route which is 500 miles. A little each year!

Carol was born in Surrey and brought up in Chingford, Essex. Her career has been mainly in personnellhuman resources and with British Gas. In 1991 Carol was seconded to the Senior Managing Director where she stayed until 1993. At that time she joined the Institute of Citizenship and later became Chief Executive. Set up in 1986 its aim is to encourage and promote responsible and participative citizenship within society.

Carol’s first Christian experience was when she cried seeing Jesus on the cross in a comic strip when she was 8 years old. Why did they kill such a good man? she thought. For her ninth birthday she asked for and received a Bible and a Book of Common Prayer. ( God moves in mysterious ways.) A R.I. teacher deepened her interest and this led to Carol’s confirmation at 14. Carol’s family were not Church going Christians; her father was a natural philosopher and her mother an upright, honest and good person.

Carol had vocational thoughts at this time but the opportunities were limited to a convent so she entered the commercial world where she lived out her faith, a hint of her current Non-Stipendary role.

Carol moved to High Wycombe in 1978 and settled into St. Mary’s, Beaconsfield where she found Revd. Mark Fitzwilliams a stimulating preacher and pastor. He had the wisdom to allow her to come ‘just on Sundays’ until she joined the choir. Meanwhile her faith deepened. After two special experiences she became able to offer her whole life to God. This lead to her offer to work for the Church in 1985 and Carol was accepted for ordination training in 1986.
After wise counselling by Bishop Simon towards Non-­Stipendary Ministry Carol trained on the Oxford Ministry Course. On ordination in 1989 Bishop Simon asked Carol to move to All Saints Parish Church, High Wycombe. Following legislation Carol was ordained Priest in 1994. This was a truly overwhelming experience with the excitement and joy among the huge congregation.

Carol’s greatest joy is to help people on their spiritual journey. She considers it a privilege to be alongside people when they have a need. There is a sense of helplesness but through God she can feel and offer love to them.

The downside is the administration. It is a hindrance to her real work and she is therefore very grateful for all the help she receives.

I have mentioned a couple of times that Carol is a Non­-Stipendary Minister. What this means is “Carol is not paid!”

Every parish would like a fuly paid Priest but it is not possible, according to the management! People like Carol give freely of the gifts they have been given by God. It is hard work. It is not an easy life but as the letter on page 2 comments upon, it is no surprise to Carol and she accepts the work she must do.

Carol during her time at Holy Trinity has introduced change and helped the congregation develop its own faith and worship. There has not always been harmony and the role of a Minister is to help each of us to find their our own contribution

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Altar arrangements in Penn Church, Part 1

There is currently a controversy over the removal of the altar’s riddel posts, side curtains and dossal (rear curtain) and the move forward of the altar to allow the priest to stand behind it facing the congregation in the nave. In past centuries, passionate argument on these and allied subjects have contributed to the Civil War and the execution of an Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as landing a former Vicar of Penn in Aylesbury gaol.

Part One – Medieval – The Catholic church

The controversy stretches back many centuries. The pre­Reformation Catholic Church gave absolute primacy to the altar. It was not an accessory but rather the church was more the shelter for the altar, often called Christ’s Board or God’s Board. From shortly before the Conquest, wooden altars, such as we now have in Penn, were banned. A stone altar on stone supports or legs was required, made of a single slab (known as the mensa or table) symbolising the unity of the Church and the oneness of her belief. It was always incised with five crosses, one on each corner and one in the centre (as is Penn’s wooden altar), symbolising the wounds of Christ. There was sometimes a cavity for the reliquary containing the holy relic, fragments of a saint’s body or possessions, proudly preserved by every church. (Just possibly St Paul for Penn and hence Pauls Hill and Old Pauls Farm).

The medieval chancel was separated from the nave by a carved wooden Rood-screen in order to increase the sense of the chancel as a holy place. The altar was the focus of the church, the Holy of Holies, where the priest, with his back to the congregation, performed the secret part of the Mass, the mystery of transubstantiation by means of which the bread and wine were transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. ‘Rightly performed secretly‘, said Durandus, a 13th century French bishop and Papal Legate, ‘because man can in no wise fully comprehend so great a mystery‘. The priest was seen as the indispensable intermediary between God and His people, addressing prayers to God on their behalf. The parishioners generally only took communion themselves once a year at Easter following their obligatory annual confession. For the rest of the year, they were spectators, alerted by the ringing of the sacring bell and eager for the sight of the Host in the raised hands of the priest, which was fervently believed to bring them God’s blessing.

In the first centuries after the Conquest, the altar, largely unadorned, stood out well away from the east wall, both to emphasise its dignity and significance and to allow the bishop to walk around it to touch each cross with holy oil during the act of consecration. Later, the altar was moved back against the east wall of the chancel and was often increasingly dominated by an elaborate altar-piece and reredos behind and above it, with more and more ornaments such as candlesticks reliquaries and church plate, piled on to the altar itself. In smaller parish churches, like Penn, the long east window, almost down to the altar, formed the reredos.

We know from an inventory of church goods, in July 1552, that Penn’s altar cross was flanked by ‘great candelstikes with other brasse‘, and that the Reserved Sacrament (the consecrated bread reserved for the sick and the dying) in a (probably silver) pyx covered with a costly fabric, hung above it, with banners overhead. Canon Law also required a statue of the Virgin and the patronal image, in our case that of the Trinity (represented elsewhere by the image of an old man, a crucifix and a dove), in a curtained niche in the wall on each side.

16th Century The Protestant Reformation

The Protestant view was quite different. They rejected the need for a sacriicial altar with a priest as an intermediary, arguing that Christ had already made His sacrifice for us all. They were nervous about kneeling to take communion in case they were accused of worshipping the bread and wine as the actual body and blood of Christ. They believed this to be ‘an Idolatry to be abhorred of all faithful Christians‘ on the very practical grounds that He was already in Heaven and so could not ‘be at one time in more places than one’. Thus, in 1552, Edward VI’s Privy Council ordered the abolition of all stone altars and the first Protestant Prayer Book of 1552 removed any idea that communion could be celebrated by a priest for a watching congregation, but only when ‘there be a good nombre to celebrate with the priest‘. Communion was to be celebrated by a priest wearing neither cope nor vestment, but a simple surplice like the parish clerk or the choir. The celebration was to take place not at God’s Board but at a table set in the body of the church, the priest standing on the north side, and any unconsecrated bread or wine left over was to be taken home by the curate for domestic consumption. All trace of association with the priest before the altar at Mass was removed. The Commissioners who inspected every church to ensure compliance were instructed to leave only a cup, a bell, a covering for the table and a surplice.

In 1539, after Cromwell had issued a set of Royal Injunctions radically changing practice and ritual, the vicar I of Penn was put in Aylesbury gaol, on account of the utterance by him of certain opprobrious words’. His accusers may well have been his two churchwardens.
What a precedent!

In 1553, with Mary now on the throne, stone altars and Catholic ritual were restored, but only for five years because she was then succeeded by the Elizabeth, whose commissioners ensured a suppression of the externals of Catholicism over the twenty years. The consequence of this Protestant zeal for destruction, the disparagement of outward forms and sacraments and the teaching that religion was rather a matter for individual communion between man and God was that many people disregarded their obligation to keep their parish church in good repair, especially chancels. In 1603, Queen Elizabeth wrote to the bishop of Lincoln that she ‘had been informed that divers churches and chancels were greatly decayed and were either fallen down, or were like to fall down’.

Penn’s chancel is particularly likely to have been neglected because the Penn family, the lay rectors who were responsible for it, remained Catholic for nearly a century after the Reformation.  Attendance at church was compulsory with fines for non-attenders, but only 120 people, about half the population of the parish, were recorded as communicants in 1603.

© MIles Green, May 2003

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Altar arrangements in Penn Church, Part 2

17th Century Drawing of Penn Church

17th Century: Archbishop Laud and the Commonwealth

In 1633, Charles I appointed William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a fervent High Churchman vehemently opposed to the narrow and destructive tendencies of the Puritan wing of the Anglican Church. He was determined to restore some of the pre-Reformation practices and in so doing made many enemies and even provoked armed revolt in Scotland. He was impeached by the Puritan Long Parliament in 1640 and executed in 1643.

Many churches at this time kept the communion table at the east end of the chancel, but moved it for communion into the middle of the chancel or the nave and turned it east-west. The Puritan view was that it should stay in the body of the church, but then without a Rood-screen it had no protection and was used by all and sundry for their own purposes – by churchwardens for their accounts, by children being schooled, by workmen for their tools and even by dogs relieving themselves. Laud directed that the altar should at all times occupy the same position as the ancient altar and be railed in (usually on three sides) against the east wall, both to protect it and as a visible assertion of its sanctity and mystery. The rails were typically required to be ‘neare one yard in height, so thick with pillars that dogs may not get in‘. The rails were not intended for the convenience of kneeling communicants.

After Laud’s impeachment in 1640, the Long Parliament responded, by appointing commissioners to visit the counties to ‘destroy all images, crucifixes, superstitious pictures and altars or holy tables turned altar-wise that yet remained in churches.’ In 1643, the Commonwealth Parliament passed an Act for ‘the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all monuments of superstition and idolatry’. This included altars and tables of stone and many altar rails.

In 1637, at the height of Laud’s influence, a Bishop’s visitation of Penn indicates that the communion table was in the chancel and presumably at the east end since it refers to wainscot over it that was in need of repair and of the need to set a board with the ten commandments above it. There was no mention of rails. The visitation revealed a church in a dreadful state of repair and neglect, with broken, partly- boarded windows and seats, a leaking roof and ‘pavements in decay‘. There were three monstrous family pews seven and a half feet high intruding into, the centre aisle of the chancel, and others in the nave and south aisle. There was a reading-seat on the south side ‘so high that it damms up the light of the chancel‘ and a pulpit on the north side.

This neglect was the consequence, typical in Buckinghamshire, of the Puritan irreverence and contempt for the church and all it stood for and the consequent grudging of every penny they were taxed for church purposes. The majority of local gentry and clergy regarded sermons as the only reason for coming to church. There is further evidence of Puritan sympathies in Penn in the survival in office during the Commonwealth of Wllllam Lincke, Penn’s longest ever serving Vicar (1607-61). About one in seven of Buckinghamshire clergy, the ‘scandalous ministers‘, were ejected from their livings after Charles was defeated in 1646, to be replaced by ‘godly, diligent and painful preachers‘. William Lincke was described, in 1649, as ‘diligent‘ and unlike his predecessor, was licensed to preach and is earlier recorded as preaching every Sunday1.
The two leading members of the parish were also clearly sympathetic to Parliament. The owner of one of the monstrous pews in the chancel was Sir Gregory Norton, who was one of King Charles’ judges in 1649, and later signed his death warrant. William Penn,  the patron of Penn church was appointed as Sheriff of Buckinghamshire in 1656.

In the 1640s and 50s, during the Commonwealth, the Communion table was required to be back in the nave, often with seats around it. In 1662, after the restoration of the monarchy, the Book of Common Prayer was reluctantly revised in an attempt to find a compromise between traditionalists and reformers. This 1662 version is still in use in Penn. It requires parishioners to take communion at least three times a year and orders that, ‘The table at the Communion time having a fair white linen cloth upon it, shall stand in the body of the Church or in the Chancel… and the Priest standing at the north side of the Table …

A drawing of the outside of Penn church, at about that time, shows a diagonally-leaded east window, narrower than today, with what appears to be plain glass. The medieval stained glass would have been removed at the Reformation or during the Commonwealth.

© Miles Green, August 2003

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Altar arrangements in Penn Church, Part 3

A new chancel designed for preaching

In 1714, Roger Penn had the chancel wainscoted and railed in and gave ‘a new Table, with a purple Cloath, edged round with a silk Purple & Gold Fringe.’ His sister, Martha, gave a crimson velvet cushion bound with a broad gold lace & fringed tassels and ‘a velvet pulpit cloth of the same colour’. Or Mather, the vicar in 1763, gave a new cloth for the communion table with gold and silk fringe, two cushions for the table and two prayer books.

John Bennet, vicar of Penn from 1700 to his death in 1715 (his portrait hangs in Penn House), recorded that he held four communion services every year attended by 50 to 60 out of a total population of 480 (109 families) and that ‘there were many at years of discretion who never communicate‘. There were also ten dissenting families five of whom were Quakers.

The appearance of Penn’s chancel, between the 1730s when it was taken down to within four feet of the ground, rebuilt and extended by some eight feet, can be seen in the Ziegler painting below, of which a photograph is hanging in the church. Roger Penn’s wainscot and rails seem to have survived the rebuild and it is probably his very low table that can be seen covered by a purple cloth, with what looks like a prayer book on a cushion at each end. There was no cross or candlestick on the table and no curtains around or any other embellishment. There were low wooden railings with kneelers in front and wainscot behind, with a fine looking east window showing Christ and his disciples at Emmaus There was no wooden Rood-screen separating the chancel and the chancel arch had been widened and rounded. Typically for an Anglican church of the period, the focus of worship had moved from the altar to the three-decker pulpit, prayers read out to the people and lengthy sermons.

Penn Church in the mid-19th Century, painting by H.B.Zeigler.

© Miles Green, October 2003
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