|
The Voices of Morebath
Home
|
Eamon Duffy’s “The Voices of
Morebath. Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village” (Yale. 2001)
drew very considerable praise in reviews in the Catholic press and
elsewhere. I wish to express my own great misgivings now that I have had time
to study the book with the care it deserves. I would suggest that Duffy’s
highly favourable and approving representation of Sir Christopher Trychay,
successively Morebath’s Catholic parish priest and Protestant vicar is both
misleading and unmerited; that the “integrity” he attributes to Trychay’s “accommodating
traditionalism” on the evidence is unsupportable; and that his treatment of the man does a grave injustice to
the brave stand taken by both martyrs and recusants in defence of their Catholic
faith in the face of apostasy, heresy and persecution.
The book is an account of the
priest of Morebath in Devon from 1520 till his death 54 years later in
1574, who ministered to the small farming parish under Henry, Edward, Mary
and Elizabeth, using the detailed parish accounts which Trychay himself
wrote. Trychay began his ministry in the village as its Catholic parish priest, became its
Church of England vicar under Henry at the break with the Apostolic See,
was its Protestant vicar under the “onslaught” and “wholesale purge”
(p.118) carried out under the boy-king Edward, reverted to being its
Catholic priest under Mary, and became again its Protestant Church of
England vicar under Elizabeth.
Duffy employs Trychay to
conclude his book “The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in
England 1400-1580” published nine years earlier (Yale 1992). His assessment
of Trychay in the earlier volume (page 592) is repeated in The Voices: “It would be quite mistaken to think of
Sir Christopher as an unscrupulous Vicar of Bray” (page 176).
The actual evidence, as
produced by Duffy, does not support this assessment. Instead it shows Trychay’s
in a far more questionable and murky light than any pathetic Vicar of Bray,
no matter how unscrupulous the latter may supposedly have been. The
accounts reveal Trychay as nothing better than a time-server, hanging on to
his living no matter what. Employing the very word Duffy himself used to me
in conversation about the whole of the English hierarchy under Henry except
for John Fisher, Trychay is revealed as nothing less than an apostate, and
that twice over. First under Henry, then under Elizabeth. And indeed as
something worse. He encouraged his own parishioners to risk their lives in
the Prayer Book Rebellion, and even get killed, while taking great care to
conceal his own involvement. The very records Duffy place before us show
him knowingly taking his parish into apostasy and leading them in
repudiating the very Faith that had provided, in the memorable phrase of
The Stripping of the Altars (p.593) “the landmarks of a thousand years”.
The hard facts are these.
Trychay held on to his Morebath living for 54 years, from 1520 to 1574,
when he died. He himself wrote the parish records which have been
preserved. In 1534 Henry proclaimed himself the Head of the Church in
England. In August 1536 Cromwell issued the Injunctions “designed to
enforce conformity” (p.398 of ‘The Stripping’) to Henry’s supremacy and
Protestant Christianity. There was widespread resistance but “Morebath’s
obedience ...was strikingly prompt” (Voices p.100) and “By contrast (to
opposition elsewhere), from mid-September 1538 Morebath seems obediently
and completely to have abandoned the active promotion of the cult of the
saints which had hitherto been the most striking feature of its devotional
life and in the year that followed the parish dutifully equipped itself
with all the books and other items required by the Injunctions” (Voices
p.101). The significance of this can be only be fully appreciated if on
reading the accounts one appreciates how active Trychay himself had been
since becoming the parish priest in promoting devotion to the saints.
(Duffy throughout The Voices calls this ‘the cult of images’, which of
course is an incorrect and
misleading representation of Catholic belief). In 1547 Somerset
issued the next set of Injunctions which were “in reality a charter for
revolution” (ibid p.118). They “systematically edited out” (ibid)
traditional Catholicism root and branch and with it all the devotional
practices which were the expression of Catholic incarnational theology. It was “Morebath dismantled” (p.111).
Trychay complied totally. “By the early summer of 1549 the parish of
Morebath had been stripped to the bone” (p.127). The fundamental changes in
Christian belief contained in the Injunctions and their enforcement in matters
of the Eucharist, prayers and devotions, were not resisted. Trychay may
have dragged his feet when he moved from altar to table but move across he
surely did.
Duffy has quite misread, and
hence misrepresented, one main element of the significance of Trychay’s
actions during the 1548/9 Western Rebellion in Devon and Cornwall against
Cramner’s new liturgy which the rebels said was “lyke a Christmas game”
(p.133). They besieged Exeter.
Morebath “equipped and financed a group of five young men to join the
rebels in the camp outside Exeter at St. David’s Down” (p.134). Their names
were William Hurley, Christopher Morsse, Thomas Borrage, John Timewell and
Robert Zaer. “The parish, it seems, sent their brightest and best to fight
on their behalf...They went with the parish’s blessing and support” (p.135)
each being given 6 shillings and 8 pence “at hys goyin forthe”, for swords
for the first four and a bow for Zaer. The rebel army was defeated and
routed by Lord Russell at Clyst St. Mary, east of Exeter on August 5th.
Some 4000 men were killed including Hurley, Morse and Borrage. Zaer and
Timewell escaped and got back to Morebath. “The regime singled out priests
for special punishments and half a dozen were executed”. (p.134). Not Sir
Christopher Trychay. Being the diligent parish clerk that he was he had
punctiliously noted the expenditure in the parish accounts. “An indiscreet
record” Duffy calls it. With equal diligence he then concealed his
involvement in the rebellion by blotting out references to the rebel camp.
The blottings-out can be seen on p.137.
Duffy represents it all as evidence that the Christianity of the
English people was still deeply and overwhelmingly Catholic. Indeed it was.
He does not reflect on the obvious, that Trychay sent out his young men to
fight and die in a war he would not die for himself, successfully concealed
his own involvement and kept his living for another 25 long years. And
there is something else equally disturbing. “Morebath may well have been
mourning the violent death of the three men....If any knells were rung for them, Sir
Christopher did not record them in his book, for knells like the Mass had
been vanquished at the siege of Exeter” (p.142). Did he give the three lads
he sent to their death some form of public requiem as was their ancient
due, or did he deny it to them to save his skin? This is now known only to
God.
From the Rebellion to the
death of Edward in 1553 Morebath under its vicar then fully accommodated to
the new Protestant faith. “Morebath may have been specially anxious to
protest its loyalty....By 1553 Morebath and Sir Christopher had shifted
into granting the foundational claim of the English Reformation, the
Crown’s headship of the church. They had travelled a long way from St.
David’s Down” (p.151). However, says Daffy, “Sir Christopher’s heart was
about to lift” (ibid). Edward died, Mary came on the throne and England was
restored to Catholic communion, even though at that precise moment “in
Morebath the accession of Mary found the warden, Sir Christopher’s brother
Lewis dutifully providing for the long term future of Protestant worship in
the parish”. One can only conclude that if ever there was a couple of men
able to bend with whatever wind was blowing, it was these two brothers.
Trychay became once more a Catholic priest. On the death of Mary, he
reverted to being the parish Protestant parson (the details of each
metamorphosis are in chapter 7).
Duffy’s explanation for
Trychay’s personal history of compromise is an interesting one. He does his
level best to excuse and defend his subject. Not a single word of criticism
is uttered, not even, as we have seen when Trychay sent young men to die
for a faith he would never risk his own life for. Trychay, writes Duffy,
would never pursue a principle “at the cost of the dear and familiar”
(p.176). Doctrine may have counted for something, like “loyalty to the
Mass, the ancient faith, the sacraments” but they were very secondary. What
mattered for him was that “his traditionalism....was informed before everything
else by the genius of place; his
religion in the end was the religion of Morebath”. Though as a historian
one can right expect Duffy to supply some evidence for this sally into the
sociology of religion, he does not produce any. One can only ascribe his
efforts to loyalty to his subject. The evidence however simply is this, that
Trychay was a self-seeking turncoat whenever it matter.
“Sir Christopher schooled
Morebath in the ways of Protestantism” under Elizabeth and even conducted
prayers against the Catholic Lords of the North of England in the 1569
rebellion as “common enemies as well to the truth of thy eternal word as to
their own natural prince and country, and manifestly to this crown and
realm of England” (p.179). Trychay’s journey of conformity without
adherence to principle certainly took him a long way from the faith into
which he had been baptised and which he had been ordained to preach.
Duffy’s sympathy for his subject seeps out of every line. “The unthinkable
alternative to conformity was to leave his vicarage and the people he had
baptised, married and buried for forty years” (p 176). He goes even further
with a statement that surely merits some thinking about. “It was a course
few took, for in 1559 there must have seemed very little he or anyone else
could do if the Queen chose to stay out of the Pope’s communion, even
supposing the Pope figured very much at any time on Morebath’s horizon”.
Duffy is fully entitled to his own theology but as a historian he supplies
no evidence in this book for his assertion that the role of the Papacy
counted for little in English Christianity, something which is more than
doubtful in the church of Bede, Becket and More. But what is Duffy also
saying here? He tells us on the very next page: “The accommodating
traditionalism of men like Christopher Trychay had its own integrity,
making possible the marriage of the old ways and the new, offering their
congregations some preliminary gleams of the mellow light that plays over
the church of George Herbert” (p 177). One might recognise here a sort of
theological Blairism, which may indeed be the present fashion in some
academic circles, where the knee is bent to pragmatism and shoulders
shrugged at principle. The composers of prayers under Elizabeth for recitation
in all churches, which were used by the state to support its aims as
vigorously as the media is used today, though they did not seem to have
employed the word, doubtless had ‘wreckers” in mind when they circulated the
prayers against the North of England Catholic Lords which I have quoted. Duffy
is very gallant in the way he holds that somehow, somewhere, there is
integrity in a man who, clinging onto his living through thick and thin,
rejected the faith into which he was christened and ordained -communion
with the See of Saint Peter, catholic and orthodox beliefs on the
eucharist, the priesthood and the sacraments and “the landmarks of a
thousand years” of English Christianity, which I would say are worth far
more than anthems and sweet music.
I can understand how an
author might lose his way in his devotion to his subject. However, the hard
evidence of the accounts Trychay himself kept deliver a very clear, and
alternative, verdict. He was a turncoat. He was a time-server. He
compromised at every turn. Worse still, he sent men to their deaths and
concealed his own involvement. He clung to his living at all costs. To
eulogise him the way this book does, I suggest, is to betray all those
Catholics, men and women, who died for their faith in the most hideous of
ways and those many more who held on through the centuries of persecution
while Trychay, in Duffy’s own word, accommodated. To eulogise him the way
this book does, I suggest, is to imply that the faith they died for is not
so important that it couldn’t be accommodated to what in the judgement the
Catholic Church was heresy. There is however an alternative view of things,
that of Thomas More at his trial: “This Realme, being but one member and
smale parte of the Church, might not make a particular lawe disagreable
with the general lawe of Christes vniversall Catholike Churche”. There it
stands, and stands forever.
In conclusion, the accounts Trychay kept so meticulously
are not the voices of Morebath. They are a voice, not voices, the voice of
one man only. The voices of Robert Zaer, John Timewell, Christopher Morsse,
William Hurley and Robert Borrage are not recorded. Three of them died
outside Exeter with 4000 others, martyrs defending their Catholic faith.
Whether a knell was ever rung for them in their own parish church is known
only to God. To save his own skin and keep his living Sir Christopher
Tychay does not record it. He tried to blot out his involvement but their
memory lasts forever. And the most fitting memorial there could be to those
young men might be a Requiem Mass in their own Morebath church one day, in the
Latin language they would have recognised and felt as theirs, even if they
did not understand it, “more antiquo and secundum usum Sarum” (p.154), in
the ancient way and according to the use of Sarum, as recommended under
Mary at Much Wenlock by
Sir Thomas Butler when for a brief period their Catholic faith was restored
to their England, their county and their village church. And that would be
an ecumenical act second to none.
Home
|